Lecture Series: Configurations of Spanish and Portuguese America in Jesuit Cartographic Works in the Late Ming Period (17th century), by Ana Carolina Hosne
March 24 2023, 15:00 CET. Hybrid: In person at KU Leuven, Erasmushuis, LET 5.15 and online via Zoom.
It is a well-known fact that Jesuit missionaries in China engaged in cartographic and geographic knowledge production, among other fields, and elaborated different world maps with the help of their Chinese collaborators, friends and protectors. Representations of Spanish and Portuguese America in these maps drew on, to a great extent, European cartographic sources, travel accounts and Jesuit works on those parts of the world. Geographic locations and descriptions were sometimes paired with more or less detailed information regarding the local populations, their customs, beliefs, social organization, and local products, among other aspects. This lecture proposes to examine the selections, omissions and misconceptions in the Jesuit interpretation of these European sources, as well as the translation processes involved in these configurations of Spanish and Portuguese America on Chinese soil.
Ana Carolina Hosne is Associate Researcher at the National Council for Scientific Research (CONICET), Argentina. She specializes in early modern mission history, cultural exchanges between China, Europe and colonial Latin America in the early modern period with a special focus on Jesuit missions. Before this position, she was EURIAS fellow at the Paris Institute for Advanced Studies and, previously, Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Heidelberg. She has been appointed Visiting fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies (Taiwan), The Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural Exchange (California), Harvard University, and Indiana University, among other institutions. She is author of The Jesuit Missions to China and Peru. Expectations and Appraisals of Expansionism, 1570-1610 (Oxon: Routledge, 2013), co-editor of the volume Imagined Peripheries. “Barbarians” in East Asia, from antiquity through the imperial era, to be published by the University of Costa Rica Press (forthcoming in March 2022), and of many articles in international peer-reviewed journals.
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