The Interweaving of Rituals

Reviews / Votes

"Nicolas Standaert's impressive research on funerary rites in China and Europe in the seventeenth century shows again that we cannot use a universal recipe in the study of cultural exchanges. . . . This book is a compelling example of a historiographical narrative that takes into account the two-way nature of Chinese and Catholic relations.

- Marco Musillo (European History Quarterly) "A fascinating tale about cultural exchange in the early history of East-West relations."

(China Review International) "The author deftly traces the emergence of a new Chinese Christian identity in the seventeenth century. Along the way, Nicolas Standaert proposes an important new framework for analyzing cultural exchanges in situations where an entity other than the West plays a dominant role.... The Interweaving of Rituals is a welcome corrective to a scholarship that at times has emphasized incommensurability, dominance, and the impossibility of understanding."

(The Historian) "In this systematic study of funeral rituals, Nicolas Standaert has assembled all relevant sources from western-language documents... and Chinese records... to weave together a panoramic tapestry of the evolution of funeral rituals among Chinese Christians from the time of Matteo Ricci to the eve of Cardinal Tournon's visit to China."

(Archivum Historicum) "The book will appeal broadly to researchers who are interested in intercultural relations, as well as those focusing on religion in China or late imperial culture. The numerous illustrations of tombs, mourning clothes, and funerary processions will captivate general audiences."

(Journal of Asian Studies) "Standaert's topic is an inspired choice, and the result is a readable and thought-provoking study with relevance well beyond the study of Christianity in China."

(Journal of Chinese Religions) "Nicolas Standaert offers readers surprising perspectives on the often shunned topics of death, commemoration of the deceased, and interment. . . . The text contains a generous number of illustrations from a variety of printed and archival sources that depict Chinese and Sino-European funeral scenes and processions, plus schema of grave plot-design and funeral apparatus. [Standaert's] contributions to the field are extensive and tireless."

(Sino-Western Cultural Relations Journal XXXI (2009)) "Standaert goes to the very core of socio-religious inculturation, by means of analysing the changing nature of futerary rites in Christian, Buddhist and Confucian ritual communities."

(China Quarterly (June 2009)) "A valuable new study of a subject that has attracted surprisingly scant attention, that of religious ritual. . . . The arguments made in this study are solidly grounded in copious citations from printed sources in Chinese as well as a host of Western languages."

(Renaissance Quarterly)