Book Smart

Sojourners in a Strange Land: Jesuits and Their Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009)

Florence Hsia, associate professor of History of Science and Integrated Liberal Studies

For her first full-length book, Florence Hsia examines the history of a group of explorers determined to unite different worlds: China and Europe, science and religion.

“The Christian missionary-scientist has stood on the frontlines of so many cross-cultural encounters, both historical and fictional,” says Hsia, citing figures such as David Livingstone in Africa and the Jesuit explorer sent to make contact with other worlds in Mary Doria Russell’s novels The Sparrow and Children of God. “Clearly there’s a kind of mystique about this synthesis of science and religion in the figure of the missionary as a man of science.”

By examining the historical roots of this iconography, Hsia focuses on the ways in which European Jesuit missionaries in late imperial China tried to reconcile their scientific and religious commitments. Tracking the routes of French Jesuits in the 1680s, she shows how the Europeans presented their work and themselves, ultimately serving as more than just vehicles for Western thought.

Hsia’s work has won her accolades on a global and local scale. A recent fellowship in Berlin at the Max Planck Institute gave her access to rare historical archives and an ever-changing array of scholars from around the world. She plans to return in two years as part of the Institute’s “Sciences of the Archives” project, finding new ways to analyze her current work.

Research for that book, tentatively titled “Darkness at Noon,” continues to unite Christian thought with Chinese records of science. It examines Chinese accounts of a solar eclipse that some thought accounted for the darkness over Golgotha at the time of Jesus’ death on the cross.

Student reactions continue to drive her work, especially when she recalls her own studies. As a senior in college, she took a course on the history of science in China and Europe.

“The material they assigned on the Jesuit episode in late imperial China is there in my book’s bibliography,” says Hsia, “which tells you something about the difference a single class can make.”

She shares a student evaluation from last spring. Next to a column of Scantron bubbles, the student drew a personal version of Francis Bacon’s 1620 work “Great Instauration.” Bacon uses ships sailing into the open Atlantic as a visual metaphor for the daring voyage of intellectual discovery in a skeptical society, with the Pillars of Hercules marking the limits of the classical world. Scribbled during a hasty evaluation period, the student’s voyage of discovery — between pillars labeled “Madison” — included a pool labeled “skeptical crisis?” underneath a boat and a “summer in California.”

“In both form and content, the drawing reminds me that to be a student is to be willing to journey beyond what is known and familiar,” says Hsia. “It’s a willingness I hope students in my classes can recognize in me as well.”

Filling the rest of the comment space with effusive scrawl, the student wrote “Thanks for everything.”