Translating Knowledge Between Europe and China in the Early Modern Age: Science, Language, and Empire

The story of the Jesuit evangelizing enterprise in late Ming and early Qing China is well-known, and much research has been done he transfers of knowledge that were part of it. In recent decades, attention focused more specifically on the work of translation that took place in this context. This new focus has contributed to showing how Europe and China learned about each other, but also from each other at that time. Several European languages were involved the translations; and after the Qing dynasty settled in Beijing in 1644, Manchu became an important target and source language for translators.

Looking at some examples that pertain to mathematics, natural history and geography, I propose to show how elements of knowledge were reshaped in the process of translation, and how their reconstruction made it possible for them to be integrated into knowledge systems different from, and often deemed incompatible with, the ones in which they had originated. Knowledge thus translated was in turn reshaped by further circulation: translation was only one stage, albeit a crucial one, in the multiple transformations involved in transcultural exchanges.

Catherine Jami is a Senior Researcher at the French CNRS. A former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, she has a dual background in mathematics and Chinese studies. Her PhD dissertation (1985, Université Paris-Nord) focused on an eighteenth-century Chinese mathematical work. Working at CNRS since 1991, she has studied the reception of European sciences introduced into China by the Jesuits from the early 17th century onwards. Starting with the mathematical sciences, she has extended her work in several directions: imperial science at the beginning of the Qing dynasty, with the publication in 2012 of The Emperor’s New Mathematics: Western Learning and Imperial Authority in China during the Kangxi reign (1662-1722) (Oxford University Press); the role of elite mobility in the circulation of knowledge, with the edited volume Individual Itineraries and the Spatial Dynamics of Knowledge: Science, Technology and Medicine in China, 17th-20th centuries (Paris, Collège de France); the circulation of science between Europe and East Asia, with a series of books co-edited with Luis Saraiva (Singapore, World Scientific); in collaboration with Christopher Cullen, she is working on astronomy in early Qing Beijing, and in particular on the “Calendar Case” (1664-1669). The first results of this collaboration have been published in the Journal for the History of Astronomy (2020 and 2022). In addition to this research, she has held positions of responsibility at an international level. In particular, she was Secretary General of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. She has been the editor-in-chief of the journal East Asian Science, Technology and Medicine from 2017 to 2024.