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A picaresque yarn about an Italian man who comes of age during the Counter Reformation of the sixteenth century and enters the Roman Catholic priesthood as a Jesuit. After studies in Rome, he leaves Europe permanently to missionize India (Conchin, Goa) and China.
He helped with the first translation of Euclid into Chinese, and translated Confucian classics into Latin.
The title refers to Ricci's interest in the mnemonic systems that associated facts with imaginary spaces (cities, neighborhoods, buildings, individual rooms). These were an inheritance of European antiquity (spuriously attributed to Cicero) that Jesuits in particular used for scholarly and devotional purposes.
Ricci described these systems in Chinese writings, hoping to impress Chinese elites with European study tips of general application and thereby pique their interest in Roman Catholicism.
Ricci's travels show us how incredibly varied the world was in the early mercantilist period by comparison with our own. The great economic divergence between some European regions and the rest of the world was just beginning. A European traveler like Ricci could still be awed by the wealth and technology of foreign societies.
It is difficult to really put oneself in the shoes of these groups of missionaries who were so radically cut off from their society of origin. For Ricci, a letter might take eight years to make the trip from the Italian peninsula to his mission in China or vice versa. On long distance sea voyages like Ricci's, immense suffering was guaranteed and death was quite likely.
Ricci and his Chinese interlocutors are continually trying to find some isomorphism between their own culture and the culture of the other. Whether this produced a greater change in their self-understanding, or their understanding of the other, is ambiguous.