This course explores the contribution of savants and proto-scientists, a few of them residing in Rome like Athanasius Kircher,SJ, to the production and transmission of knowledge about East Asia during the XVII century. Selected topics in the history of science will be explored during the second semester. The student will know the contribution of Jesuit savants, like Athanasius Kircher, Jean Baptiste du Halde, and others, to the production and circulation of knowledge about China in early modern Europe; he/she will be able to place this body of knowledge within the larger context of the scientific debates of the time, mainly those concerning cosmology, diversity, technological mastery and scientific primacy.

Paula Findlen (ed.), Athanasius Kircher, SJ. The Last Man Who Knew Everything, London, Routledge, 2004, selected chapters; Mordechai Feingold, ‘Jesuits: Savants’, in Mordechai Feingold (ed.), Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters, Cambridge (MA), The MIT Press, 2003, pp.1-45; Ugo Baldini, ‘The Academy of Mathematics of the Collegio Romano from 1553 to 1612’, in Mordechai Feingold (ed.), Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters, Cambridge (MA), The MIT Press, 2003, pp. 47-98; Paula Findlen, “Scientific Spectacle in Baroque Rome: Athanasius Kircher and the Roman College Museum”, in Mordechai Feingold (ed.), Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters, Cambridge (MA), The MIT Press, 2003, pp. 225-284; Martha Baldwin, ‘Pious Ambition:: Natural Philosophy and the Jesuit Quest for the Patronage of Printed Books in the Seventeenth Century’, in Mordechai Feingold (ed.), Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters, Cambridge (MA), The MIT Press, 2003, pp. 285-329; Rivka Feldhay, Galileo and the Church. Political Inquisition of Critical Dialogue?, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 73-198; Elisabetta Corsi, ‘Visiting humanists and their interpreters. Ricci (and Ruggieri) in China’, China Review International, 19, no.1 (2012), pp. 1-8.