ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that a focus on gender arrangements brings social space back into the picture, showing that gendered spaces are crucial for understanding the Catholic communities administered by the Jesuits in seventeenth-century China. The prominence of house oratories in Chinese Catholicism resulted in a binary spatial pattern according to which the churches and residences were a predominantly male sphere of influence and the household a predominantly female one. According to Nicolas Trigault, the way of dealing with women was much applauded by the Chinese and gave Christianity a “holy reputation.” The general outline of differences between European Catholic and Chinese Confucian gender arrangements given in the introduction obscures a methodological problem of studying the role of gender arrangements within the history of Sino-Western cultural contact: the difficulty of making comparisons between Chinese and European gender practices. Trigault’s apology for the Jesuits’ accommodation to the literati elite conveys the impression that their evangelization project in China excluded women altogether.
