Books by Ronnie Hsia

This authoritative volume presents the history of Christianity from the eve of the Protestant Reformation to the height of Catholic Reform. It thoroughly examines the impact of the permanent schism on Latin Christendom, the Catholic responses to it, and the influence on the development of the Orthodox churches. The volume covers the history of society, politics, theology, liturgy, religious orders, and art in the lands of Latin Christianity, while expanding the boundaries of inquiry to the relationship between Christianity and non-Christian religions both in Europe and in the non-European world.

A 16th century Italian Jesuit, Matteo Ricci was the founder of the Catholic Mission in China and one of the most famous missionaries of all time. A pioneer in bringing Christianity to China, Ricci spent twenty eight years in the country, in which time he crossed the cultural divides between China and the West by immersing himself in the language and culture of his hosts. Even 400 years later, he is still one of the best known westerners in China, celebrated for introducing western scientific and religious ideas to China and for explaining Chinese culture to Europe.

The first critical biography of Ricci to use all relevant sources, both Chinese and Western, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City tells the story of a remarkable life that bridged Counter-Reformation Catholic Europe and China under the Ming dynasty. Hsia follows the life of Ricci from his childhood in Macerata, through his education in Rome, to his sojourn in Portuguese India, before the start of his long journey of self-discovery and cultural encounter in the Ming realm. Along the way, we glimpse the workings of the Portuguese maritime empire in Asia, the mission of the Society of Jesus, and life in the European enclave of Macau on the Chinese coast, as well as invaluable sketches of Ricci's fellow Jesuits and portraits of the Chinese mandarins who formed networks indispensible for Ricci's success.

Examining a range of new sources, Hsia offers important new insights into Ricci's long period of trial and frustration in Guangdong province, where he first appeared in the persona of a foreign Buddhist monk, before the crucial move to Nanchang in 1595 that led to his sustained intellectual conversation with a leading Confucian scholar and subsequent synthesis of Christianity and Confucianism in propagating the Gospels in China. With his expertise in cartography, mathematics, and astronomy, Ricci quickly won recognition, especially after he had settled in Nanjing in 1598, the southern capital of the Ming dynasty. As his reputation and friendships grew, Ricci launched into a sharp polemic against Buddhism, while his career found its crowning achievement in the imperial capital of Beijing, leaving behind a life, work, and legacy that is still very much alive today.

Dutch society has enjoyed a reputation, or notoriety, for permissiveness since the sixteenth century. The Dutch Republic in the Golden Age was the only society that tolerated religious dissenters of all persuasions in early modern Europe. Paradoxically, it was committed to a strictly Calvinist public Church and also to the preservation of religious plurality. R. Po-chia Hsia and Henk van Nierop have brought together a group of leading historians from the U.K., the U.S. and the Netherlands. Their outstanding essays probe the history and myth of Dutch religious toleration.

This groundbreaking 2007 volume gathers an international team of historians to present the practice of translation as part of cultural history. Although translation is central to the transmission of ideas, the history of translation has generally been neglected by historians, who have left it to specialists in literature and language. This book seeks to achieve an understanding of the contribution of translation to the spread of information in early modern Europe. It focuses on non-fiction: the translation of books on religion, history, politics and especially on science, or 'natural philosophy', as it was generally known at this time. The chapters cover a wide range of languages, including Latin, Greek, Russian, Turkish and Chinese. The book will appeal to scholars and students of the early modern and later periods, to historians of science and of religion, as well as to anyone interested in translation studies.

This volume brings together 29 new essays by leading international scholars, to provide an inclusive overview of recent work in Reformation history.

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• Presents Catholic Renewal as a continuum of the Protestant Reformation.
  
• Examines Reformation in Eastern and Western Europe, Asia and the Americas.
  
• Takes a broad, inclusive approach – covering both traditional topics and cutting-edge areas of debate.

This second edition features an updated synthesis of the vast scholarship on the history 0f Catholicism from the Council of Trent in the middle of the sixteenth century to the suppression of the Society of Jesus in the eighteenth century. The book covers the doctrinal and ecclesiastical renewal after Trent and the progress of Catholic reconquest in various lands. It also analyses the social composition of the Tridentine clergy and the papal curia and studies the making of early modern sainthood and the enclosure of religious women. An additional chapter on The Catholic Book as well as an updated bibliography are included.

This is the first comprehensive account of Jewish-Gentile relations in central Europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, with particular emphasis on cultural, economic, social, and political issues, and incorporating much new research. Individually, the essays probe the central questions of Jewish development within the territorial states, secular and clerical, and in both rural and urban environments. The authors grapple with such relevant issues as cultural identity, representation, toleration, and minority/majority relations.

A reconstruction of the events surrounding the death of a two-year-old boy in 1475, whose body was found in a Jewish family's house in Trent, Italy. Jewish people in Trent were arrested and charged with ritual murder and some were subsequently executed. The book is based on the trial record.

From the mid-fifteenth century to the early seventeenth, German Jews were persecuted and tried for the alleged ritual murders of Christian children, whose blood purportedly played a crucial part in Jewish magical rites. In this engrossing book R. Po-Chia Hsia traces the rise and decline of ritual murder trials during that period. Using sources ranging from Christian and Kabbalistic treatises to judicial records and popular pamphlets, Hsia examines the religious sources of the idea of child sacrifice and blood symbolism and reconstructs the political context of ritual murder trials against the Jews. "This volume combines clarity of thinking, elegance of style, and exemplary scholarly attention to detail with intellectual sobriety and human compassion."-Jerome Friedman, Sixteenth Century Journal "Hsia has... succeeded in turning established knowledge to illuminatingly new purposes."-G.R. Elton, New York Review of Books "This meticulously researched and unusually perceptive book is social and intellectual history at its best."-Library Journal "A fresh perspective on an old problem by a major new talent."-Steven Ozment, Harvard University R. Po-chia Hsia, professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is also the author of Society and Religion in Münster, 1535-1618

Recent years have witnessed some dramatic changes in the kinds of questions that historians ask about the religious schisms of sixteenth-century Europe. In the past, scholars tended to treat the Reformation as a chapter in the history of ideas, emphasizing the thought of the major reformers and the changes in Christian doctrine. Today, however, more and more historians are asking how the revolution in theology affected the lives of ordinary men and women. Aware that religious faith is part of the larger cultural and material universe of early modern Europeans, these scholars have exploited hitherto neglected sources in an attempt to reconstruct the people's Reformation.The twelve essays commissioned for this collection represent the broad spectrum of recent scholarship in the social history of the German Reformation. Historians from the United States, East and West Germany, Canada, and Britain offer a panorama of differential methodological approaches and thematic concerns. The essays are centered around four themes: cities and the Reformation; the transmitting of the Reformation in print, ritual, and song; women and the family; and lastly, the impact of the Reformation on education and other aspects of lay culture. R. Po-chia Hsia's introduction provides a brief review of the field, and a bibliographical essay offers topical reading suggestions.