Brockey, Liam Matthew 1972- (Liam Brockey)

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Brockey, Liam Matthew 1972- (Liam Brockey)

PERSONAL:

Born September 9, 1972. Education: University of Notre Dame, B.A., 1994; Brown University, M.A., Ph.D., 2002.

ADDRESSES:

Office—History Department, Princeton University, 129 Dickinson Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544-1017. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Historian, educator, writer, and editor. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, assistant professor of history.

MEMBER:

American Historical Association, Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, Renaissance Society of America, Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Alpha Theta.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Book award, Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society, and John Gilmary Shea Prize, American Catholic Historical Association, both 2007, both for Journey to the East; two grants from the J. William Fulbright Foundation for study in Portugal and Italy; several fellowships from the Luso-American Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal.

WRITINGS:

Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2007.

(Editor) Portuguese Colonial Cities in the Early Modern World, Ashgate Publishing Company (Burlington, VT), 2008.

Contributor to books, including Forgive Us Our Sins: Confession in Late Ming and Early Qing China, edited by Nicolas Standaert and Ad Dudink, Styler Verlag, 2006; contributor of articles and book reviews to professional journals, including Journal of Early Modern History, Itinerario, Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, Monumenta Serica, and the Journal of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and of essays to periodicals, including the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune. Member of the editorial board for the Bulletin of Portuguese-Japanese Studies 8 and member of the advisory board for the E-Journal of Portuguese History.

SIDELIGHTS:

Historian Liam Matthew Brockey focuses on the history of early modern Europe with an emphasis on southern Europe, including the history of Portugal's overseas empire and the Society of Jesus, more commonly known as the Jesuits. In his first book, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724, the author writes about the early Jesuit missionary endeavors in China.

In an interview on the Princeton University Web site, the author commented that he first became interested in the missionary work of the Jesuits because he was "fascinated by the richness and variety contained within Catholicism in the early modern period." The author begins his book about the Jesuits with a look at the history of the Catholic religious order. "The Society of Jesus was a pan-European religious group, an order of priests and brothers formed by St. Ignatius in 1540," noted the author in the interview on the Princeton University Web site. "The Jesuits were a well-organized, dynamic religious order with vocations toward teaching and missionary work, and in the mid-16th century the papacy—which was then trying to foster new forms of piety as well as to respond to the Reformation—was happy to give the group its blessing. The Jesuits established themselves first in Portugal, and they had a tremendous presence there in the early modern period, more so than in any other European country."

Journey to the East charts the Jesuits' efforts to bring Christianity to the East as these highly educated priests sailed from Portugal to China. According to the author, these missionaries were among the first, if not the first, Europeans to make a concentrated effort not just to bring European thought and the Christian religion to China but also to connect with the Chinese culture. According to America contributor John W. O'Malley, the book is composed of two parts: "The first is a narrative of the history of the mission, the second an analysis of the Jesuits' pastoral means and methods. Be prepared—the story and the means and methods are probably not what you have been led to expect." For example, noted O'Malley, one of the long-held myths about the Jesuit efforts in China that Brockey shows to be false was that the Jesuits focused primarily on the Chinese elite in their conversion efforts with the idea that once these leaders of Chinese government and culture were converted, the masses would follow. O'Malley comments that the author "demolishes [this myth] brick by brick, showing in fine detail how much energy the Jesuits put into working outside Peking with ordinary Chinese, many of them illiterate."

In telling the story of the Jesuit mission in China, Brockey delves into the complex political, cultural, linguistic, scientific, and religious issues that were involved in this engagement between the West and the East. "More than just the meshing of Pauline theology with Confucianism, Western science and Chinese astronomy, or transcendental monotheism versus feudal-literati politics, the experience of the Society of Jesus … was treated as a landmark event as momentous as if aliens [had] landed on earth," noted Michael Hsu in a review for the Asian Review of Books Web site.

Brockey documents numerous episodes of high drama associated with the dangers of travel at the time, particularly alone and with no protection in an almost completely foreign land. He also details how the Jesuits eventually converted approximately 200,000 Chinese to the Christian faith. However, as Brockey notes, the Jesuits' mission in China became negative in the eyes of Rome when the Jesuits began reporting that Confucianism, in their opinion, was not a religion in conflict with Christianity but rather more a philosophy of social and political customs. This viewpoint by the Jesuits was an integral part of the Chinese Rites controversy in Rome that led to the Holy See to denote Confucianism and other Chinese folk religious rites as being idolatrous. According to Brockey, this decision was the beginning of the end of the Jesuit mission in China. The Jesuit mission finally ended in the eighteenth century when China prohibited Christianity as an illegal sect in 1724.

"This insightful and elegantly written book has many virtues. I strongly recommend it for historians of early modern East Asia and of early modern Europe, and anyone with an interest in the transmission of Christianity across cultures," wrote Church History contributor Daniel H. Bays in a review of Journey to the East. Bays went on to note that although the story of the Jesuits in China has been told before, Brockey provides new insights and a comprehensiveness not found in other accounts, assisted by his use of archival resources from Portugal that had not previously been used. Bays also noted that the author "establishes more thoroughly than anyone heretofore how utterly these few European priests were dependent on their Chinese catechists and other categories of lay assistants for the expansion and especially the maintenance of the Christian communities formed." Melissa Dale, writing in the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, commented that the book "adds another important layer to our understanding of the Jesuit mission by taking readers beyond the capital and out into the provinces among the majority of converts."