Edifying and Curious
[JESUITS.]
The Travels of several learned Missioners of the Society of Jesus, into divers Parts of the Archipelago, India, China, and America. Containing a general description of the most remarkable towns; with a particular account of the customs, manners and religion of those several nations … Translated from the French original ... London, for R. Gosling, 1714.
8vo, pp. [16], 335, [17, index and advertisements], with 2 folding plates (Chinese inscription and Ginseng plant); title within double ruled frame, initials, head-, and tailpieces; bound erroneously between the ‘Contents’ and the first ‘Letter’ is The Beginners of a monastic Life, in Asia, Africa, and Europe by Sir Roger Twysden, normally found as part of the 1698 reissue of Henry Spelman’s The history and fate of sacrilege; some foxing and browning, occasional marks; overall good in later calf, gilt fillet and blind decorative borders to covers, rebacked, new endpapers.
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The Travels of several learned Missioners of the Society of Jesus, into divers Parts of the Archipelago, India, China, and America. Containing a general description of the most remarkable towns; with a particular account of the customs, manners and religion of those several nations … Translated from the French original ...
First English translation of twenty-two letters by major French Jesuit missionaries in Asia and the Americas, taken from Charles Le Gobien’s Lettres édifiantes et curieuses (1711–13). The Jesuits largely dominated seventeenth and early eighteenth-century missionary activity in the Americas and in the Far East, and thus stood at the forefront of the burgeoning disciplines of ethnology, anthropology, sinology, linguistics, world geography, and the comparative study of religions which the discovery, categorisation, and understanding of these new foreign peoples and places required.
Ten letters cover India, seven China, two Canada (Hudson’s Bay and Accadia), and one each South America (‘concerning the new mission of the Moxos’), the Philippines, Japan, the Nicobar islands, and Greece. A letter on the virtues of Ginseng by Father Petrus Jartoux inspired Jesuit missionaries in Canada to look for, and discover, ginseng there – the Jesuits then cornered a very valuable trade in the plant from Canada to China. Other letters cover the Brahmins of India, the imperial court in Beijing, the native tribes of Bolivia, and the Anglo-French battle at Hudson Bay.
ESTC T93294; Löwendahl, 326; Sabin 40707. Cf. Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism (2010).