ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Society’s Eye: Representation, Reception, and Propaganda in Jesuit Works of Medicine and Botany in China

• In Event: Seeing Health: Representing Medical Knowledge in Early Modern period

English Abstract

In the spring of 1656, the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher sent Prince Leopoldo de’ Medici a copy of the treatise Flora Sinensis, published by his Polish confrere Michael Boym few weeks earlier. The exquisite craftsmanship of the work, richly illustrated with accompanying images, made it a particularly welcome gift. Indeed, even before the text’s content, the sheer quality of the visual apparatus served to make the volume valuable and desirable: a luxury guaranteeing its wide diffusion among the elite.
This genesis makes Flora Sinensis a significant key case study for understanding the unique role of iconography in Jesuit publications in the second half of the 17th century. The scholarly debate concerning the epistemological function of the image – seeing it as a vehicle of knowledge supplementary to the written text, rather than mere ornamental decoration – has become a classic historiographical topic over the past decade. This paper intends to investigate the use of the visual medium by the Jesuits between the 1650s and 1660s, aiming to highlight its discontinuity with the established trend of giving visual tools equal status to the written word.
The choice to “turn back the clock” on the function of the iconographic apparatus drew harsh criticism against the Jesuit works published during those years. Nevertheless, the “political” and non-epistemic value reserved for the images answered to a precise and profound logic. Furthermore, the decision to apply this specific treatment to works illustrating medical and botanical practices brought back to Europe from China appears far from casual. Following a trajectory positioned at the intersection of scientific treatises and propagandistic works of identity construction, these texts allowed the Society to reify a precise image of the Chinese world. This exotic otherness, filtered by the visual medium, could generate a double level of cultural consumption, thereby cementing in the readers’ imagination the idea of an almost inaccessible land and contributing to the process of mythopoeisis undertaken by the Society since the beginning of the 17th century.

Author

• Alessandro Tripepi