ABSTRACT
As was true of so many early modern books, the long title of the China, Illustrated with Monuments Both Sacred and Profane, and Various Spectacles of Nature and Art, and Proofs of Other Memorable Matters (1667) promised much to the curious seventeenthcentury reader. The title’s broad brief allowed Kircher wide latitude in shaping his fellow Jesuits’ reports from the remote provinces of an expanding Christendom into an erudite travel guide across continents, centuries, and cultures. Published in 1667 toward the end of a long and illustrious career, the volume reflected many of the intellectual obsessions that had patterned Athanasius Kircher’s own remarkably polymathic oeuvre, from the twinned histories of Christianity and paganism to the mechanical arts, natural history, and historical linguistics. But in publishing a volume of Jesuit missionary reports on the exotic East, Kircher faced a variety of challenges. Some involved his own scholarly reputation, while others implicated members of the Society of Jesus in general.
