Eugenio Menegon . Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China . (Harvard‐Yenching Institute Monograph Series, number 69.) Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Asia Center . 2009 . Pp. xx, 450. $45.00.

For the study of Christianity in late imperial China, Jesuit missionaries have long been the belles of the Beijing ball. At the time, their foreignness attracted and repelled emperors, and even today Italian youths can dance to lyrics about “Euclidean Jesuits/dressed as bonzes/to enter the imperial court/of the Ming dynasty.” In the intervening centuries, the Jesuits have perhaps commanded more than their fair share of historical scholarship. Eugenio Menegon's book breaks this gaze to focus on Christianity not as a global but as a local religion, not in Beijing but fifteen hundred kilometers south in Fujian province's Fuan county, nourished not by Jesuits but by mendicant priests. Thus at the outset it is clear we will be exploring new ground. The book's introduction and its first chapter provide methodological and historical context. Menegon then begins a chronological narrative, surveying in three chapters the history of Fuan Christianity from a 1634 incident of Christian iconoclasm against local gods up to the 1840s and the First Opium War. Chapter breaks occur first with the unexpected opportunities of the Ming‐Qing transition in 1645, and then with the 1723 imperial prohibitions on Christianity, which proved surprisingly ineffective. The book then shifts out of a temporal and into a more thematic and explanatory gear, exploring in turn the Fuan Christians' social organization, their priests and lay institutions, their ancestral rituals, and finally the women living chastely as beatas. Often Menegon finds “congruences” between Christianity and pre‐existing traditions, which facilitated the process of localization. At times, this work furnishes a social scientist's analysis: confession is psychologically reassuring, and celibacy “expresses agency” (p. 352). More often Menegon allows his subjects to speak for themselves, and they identify their own motivations as a fear of the consequence of original sin and a desire for heaven. A conclusion takes the story to the present. Menegon builds his account on a solid, expansive foundation of sources, manuscript and archival, in Chinese and European languages. Three maps, six images, a bibliography, an index, and a short essay on the sources complete the book, which is dense and detailed, demanding and rewarding slow and careful study.

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