Jesuits and Matriarchs: Domestic Worship in Early Modern China.

• Author: Alexander, Katherine
• Position: Book review

Jesuits and Matriarchs: Domestic Worship in Early Modern China. By NADINE AMSLER. Seattle: UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS, 2018. Pp. ix + 258. $95 (cloth); $30 (paper).

By seeking to fill a gap in scholarship on Chinese Catholics in the seventeenth century, particularly how women in China were introduced to Catholicism and contributed to its development and spread, Nadine Amsler makes crucial contributions to many different fields of study in this slim, tightly organized book. While its primary audience will be those interested in the history of Catholicism in China, reflected in the justly earned laudatory blurbs from such scholars on the jacket, this book ought to be read by anyone interested in women's devotional lives in the early modern world (not only in China), histories of East-West cultural exchange, and cross-cultural constructions of gender.

Concurrently, one of the key issues at the heart of Amsler's study is what sources are "suitable" for historians, and how obscured history can be uncovered by means of source materials that, while they might not answer historians' questions directly, give credible answers nonetheless, if only we know how to listen to them. Such a creative approach, in the hands of a less careful researcher, might lead to disaster. But in Amsler's meticulous, considerate ones, "reading... against the grain" (p. 11) has resulted in a study that allows us real glimpses through the screens that elite women retreated behind when men, including Jesuit missionaries, visited their homes.

Studies of Chinese women's religious practices in the domestic sphere have been relatively popular in recent scholarship, although these studies generally focus on Buddhist devotional activities and popular religious texts. Now, Amsler's book provides a point of comparison that brings us a more complete picture of early modern Chinese women and their agency within the social limitations of gender expectations. This is an enormous task, one that requires multiple layers of framing and reframing.

Seventeenth-century Chinese Catholic women left no written records of their own religious experiences (p. 168 n. 43). Consequently, Amsler spends the first four chapters of the book focusing her analysis on the Jesuits themselves and their growing comprehension and re-interpretation of Chinese gender norms--for both men and women--so that we might better grasp the five short case studies of female religious experience that close the book. It is only by unpacking how thoroughly Jesuits in China sought to shape their identities along the lines of Confucian literati elites, and all the etiquette and gendered performances that went along with that, that the pregnancy and childbirth rituals (chap. 5), women's congregations (chap. 6), family networks of religious women (chap. 7), conventlike homes of chaste widows (chap. 8), and textiles embroidered and donated to churches (chap. 9) are able to show us the central importance of women and their homes in the development of Chinese Catholicism at its earliest stages. In doing so, Amsler's study joins those she cites on the Americas...