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Eugenio Menegon, professeur invité de l’EHESS

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Eugenio Menegon (Associate Professor, Department of History, Boston University) participe au programme Professeurs invités de l’EHESS, sur proposition d’Antonella Romano (EHESS, CAK) et de Michela Bussotti (EFEO, CCJ-CECMC), du 2 au 31 mai 2026.

Eugenio Menegon (Boston University)

Eugenio Menegon (Boston University)

Biographie

Eugenio Menegon teaches Chinese and World History at Boston University. His interests include Chinese-Western relations in late imperial times, Chinese religions and Christianity in China, Chinese science, the intellectual history of Republican China, and the history of maritime Asia. His 2009 book Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China centered on the life of Catholic communities in China’s Fujian province between 1630 and the present. His current book project is an examination of the daily life and political networking of European residents at the Qing court in Beijing during the 17th and 18th centuries. He is also co-investigator for the digital humanities project The China Historical Christian Database, 1550-1950 (https://chcdatabase.com/).

Institutional webpage: https://www.bu.edu/history/profile/eugenio-menegon/ 

Programme des conférences

1. A Global Microhistory of China in the Early Modern / Late Imperial Period (séminaire « Archives et société locale en Chine », d’Alain Arrault et Michela Bussotti)

► Jeudi 7 mai 2026, 10:30-12:30, EHESS Condorcet, Salle 25A, 2 cours des humanités, 93300 Aubervilliers

Lien Zoom de connexion pour suivre la séance en distanciel : https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86806716018?pwd=ogpMVe0OeovAtlj0Wu2lVaoZjfTHxs.1
ID de réunion: 868 0671 6018
Code secret: 308361

One of the challenges of global history is to bridge the particularities of individual lives and trajectories with the macro-historical patterns that develop over space and time. Italian micro-history, particularly popular in the 1970s–1990s, has excavated the lives of small communities or individuals to test the findings of serial history and macro-historical approaches. Micro-history in the Anglophone world has instead focused more on narrative itself, and has shown, with some exceptions, less interest for ampler historiographical conclusions. Sino-Western interactions in the early modern period offer a particularly fruitful field of investigation, ripe for a synthesis of the global and the micro-historical. Cultural, social, and economic phenomena can be traced in economic and statistical series, unpublished correspondence, and other non-institutional sources, in part thanks to the survival of detailed records of the activities of East India companies and missionary agencies in China. This seminar offers a methodological reflection on ‘global micro-history’ and focuses on the economic and socioreligious activities of the Roman Catholic mission in Beijing in the long eighteenth century as a case study. Its history uncovers unexplored facets of Chinese life in global contexts from the point of view of European missionaries and Chinese Christians in the Qing capital — ‘end users’ of the local and global networks of commerce and religion bridging Europe, Asia, Africa, and South and Central America.

 

2. The Early Modern Maritime World and the Missionary Enterprise in East Asia, 1550-1840 (séminaire « Sciences et savoirs de l’Asie orientale dans la mondialisation (XVIe-XXIesiècle) », de Catherine Jami, Bing Zhao et Huiyi Wu)

► Lundi 11 mai 2026, 14h30 à 18h30, EHESS Condorcet, Salle A527. Avec Mme Tai Li-Chuan.

La conférence de M. Eugenio Menegon aura lieu de 14h30 à 16h30, celle de Mme Tai Li-Chuan de 16h30 à 18h30.

Lien de connexion pour suivre la séance en distanciel : https://webinaire.numerique.gouv.fr/meeting/signin/invite/74229/creator/43441/hash/902009e60be8848b5ea29d3bf6136cd4369bfb72

Early modern Maritime Asia was a confusing morass of contested sovereignties and geopolitical rivalries. Yet the seaways of Asia also fostered cultural exchange and economic integration. The liminal maritime zone surrounding China remained a paradox between seas and ports teeming with legal and illegal exchange and governmental policies attempting to monopolize and restrict that exchange. Vast and fluid, maritime China long hindered state control and fostered connections determined as much by bottom-up economic and cultural logic as by top-down official impositions. State control, evasion from that control, and interloping within the interstices of China’s maritime world literally bound an array of actors and locales for distinct but interrelated goals. In maritime China, seen as a social, economic, political, and geographic space, human actors (Chinese and Western merchants and businessmen, navy officers, bureaucrats, fishermen, pirates, missionaries, and so on) productively interacted or experienced conflicts and resisted one another’s control. They did so across oceanic and coastal spaces, administrative boundaries, class lines, bureaucratic institutions, commercial and religious organizations, and competing imperial formations.

“Interlopers” within this space advanced their own projects—be they dictated by private profit spiritual calling, as in the case of religious agents, or sheer survival, as with many in the mercantile and piratical worlds— and took full advantage of the established structures of commerce and state control as their own vectors. The economic agents (in early modern parlance called “procurators”) of Catholic orders and organizations in East Asia inhabited the fringes of the Portuguese and Qing Empires, at the intersection of global maritime networks in the Pearl River Delta. They were motivated by religious and spiritual reasons, rather than economic profit, using the logistical infrastructure of global trade and of their host empires to further the religious goals of the Catholic Church, and to connect with and support the largely illegal mission stations in China and Southeast Asia. The procurators were nodes in the financial, material, and information networks both within China and connecting China to the rest of the world. These interlopers could use imperial and commercial formations as means for their own ends, even when their organizations’ goals were subversive of existing laws—as was the case with Catholic activities, forbidden by the Qing government within its borders since 1724.


3.  Invisible City: European Missionaries and Chinese Catholics in Early Qing Beijing, 17th-18th Centuries (séminaire « Histoire sociale, économique et institutionnelle de la Chine moderne, XVe-XXe siècle » de Luca Gabbiani)

► Jeudi 21 mai 2026, 14h-16h, EHESS, Salle AS1_08, 54 bd Raspail, 75006 Paris

Participer à la réunion Zoom
Meeting chat link
ID de réunion: 884 1129 9481
Code secret: 481112
 
In this seminar, I examine the intersection between specific spaces, the missionaries and their “parishes” of Christians, and the city of Beijing broadly speaking. The Christian community of Beijing in the 17th-18th centuries was an “invisible city” within the capital, to use novelist Italo Calvino’s term. It was made up of architectural spaces but, even more so, of relationships. Hidden behind walls and within churches, chapels, and residences, Beijing Christians and their pastors led a life that was, for the most part, little visible to the denizens of the imperial metropolis. Yet they retained memories and formed relationships that radiated from physical spaces and persisted even after those spaces were lost, destroyed, or reconfigured. The accomplishments of the European missionaries in China could not be measured merely by the number of converts but, instead, through the enduring socioreligious webs that they had painstakingly helped to weave. What was the structure that sustained this Catholic “invisible” community, made of material spaces, but also social, mental, and spiritual ones? And was this merely a net of “sacred spaces” or, rather, a grouping of multifunctional nodes that served a diverse range of interlocking social, economic, ritual, scientific, and diplomatic needs of the local Catholics? How did this grouping of nodes nest within and interact with the urban fabric of Qing Beijing? The most perceptible traces of Beijing’s Catholic urban community were the churches and their compounds, which, in different shapes, still exist today and are memory made tangible in bricks and stone of a long socioreligious history. They are the first gateway to understanding Catholic Beijing. The notions of visibility and invisibility serve as my conceptual threads. Since their arrival in 1601, the missionaries had struggled with a dilemma. Should their complexes be visible to the city through the construction of Western-style churches and bell towers that rose higher than neighboring buildings, with open squares and triumphal arches in front of them, so as to attract converts and show that they enjoyed elite and imperial patronage for their teaching, to the point of becoming tourist attractions for provincial visitors? Or should the safety of Chinese-style walls hiding internal courtyards and buildings, instead, obscure from public view most overt signs of foreign architecture as well as of Christian mysteries and rituals, only allowing the adepts to enter those spaces and thus avoid harassment and possible persecution? My answer cannot be unequivocal, because these two tendencies coexisted and were subject to the contingencies of ever-evolving historical conjunctures. By discussing these architectural complexes as agents in the structuring of enduring socioreligious networks, I hope to contribute to a more integrated picture of Catholic Beijing and the European presence in the city as part of our general understanding of the Qing capital, its urban fabric, its connections to the hinterland, and the vibrant life of its religious establishments, studied by scholars such as Susan Naquin, Vincent Goossaert, and the international group coordinated by the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO)—and perhaps also offer some insights into how these spaces might continue to operate in today’s Beijing.

 

The Propaganda Fide Congregation and its Missions in China and East Asia (18th century-early 19th Century) (séminaire «Prosélytismes » de Pierre-Antoine Fabre, Aliocha Maldavsky, Hélène Vu Thanh)

► Vendredi 22 mai 2026, 14h30-17h30, Campus Condorcet, Centre de colloques, Salle 3.09, Place du Front populaire, 93300 Aubervilliers. Avec Mme Elfie Guyau

Le séminaire aura lieu en ligne :

Numéro de réunion : 371 742 140 132 847
Code secret : pP94EU3T
 
The Chinese missions remained firmly in the hands of the Jesuit order under Portuguese royal patronage (padroado) from the establishment of Macao and the first arrival in Ming territory of Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci in the 1580s until the 1630s. The Jesuits, however, were not the only religious order trying to enter China. Dominicans and Franciscans based in Manila and under Spanish royal patronage relentlessly and unsuccessfully continued to aim at China as a missionary field, rebuffed by Portuguese authorities and the Jesuits. For many years, Portuguese obstruction and Chinese policing frustrated many attempts by Spanish friars to settle in China. The establishment of the Propaganda Fide Congregation in 1622 represented a direct assault against the monopoly of Portugal, and an attempt to sidestep the padroado. The Congregation did not have its own missionary personnel and thus had to rely on members of the religious orders to fulfill its mission. Thus, missionaries belonging to several religious societies, besides Dominicans and Franciscans, joined the Propaganda missions in China as Apostolic Missionaries, and sometimes were elevated to the position of Vicars Apostolic (bishops). This occurred within complex arrangements that included Spanish royal patronage for some (e.g. the Dominicans and Franciscan Alcantarines), charitable support from specific religious societies and donors for others (e.g. the Missions Étrangères de Paris), and direct – and paltry – support from Propaganda for most. A handful of secular priests also joined the mission as part of two papal legations to Beijing in 1704-05 and 1720-21. This seminar examines the history of the 18th and early 19th century Chinese and East Asian missions of Propaganda, and how the hopelessly centralizing desire to control the missions from Rome was made ineffective by the small motley crew of the Propaganda priests in Asia, coming from many religious orders and congregations, and lacking a common spirituality, education, and internal disciplinary culture. To assign a vicariate to one specific order or congregation, rather than to send apostolic visitors to bring unity as it had been the case in the 18th century, would become the best way to avoid conflict and assure success, a lesson learned especially well in the second half of the 19th century.

 

Monique Abud
Monique Abud
Centre d'études sur la Chine moderne et contemporaine, EHESS, Paris, France
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OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Monique Abud (10 avril 2026). Eugenio Menegon, professeur invité de l’EHESS. . Consulté le 10 octobre 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/161um

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