The accommodation of Confucianism articulated by Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) reflected a Neoscholastic approach in which rational agreement was the primary hinge of interreligious engagement. Ricci’s rationalism, however, was somewhat atypical among Jesuits of the late sixteenth century who often made overtures towards typology to explain the cultural and religious phenomena encountered in their missionary activities in East Asia and the New World. This article focuses on the writings of two Jesuits, the encyclopedist Antonio Possevino (1533–1611) and the China missionary Michele Ruggieri (1533–1611), who collaborated on the first European-language publication to include an extract of the Confucian corpus. It examines how Possevino adapts the manuscripts on China that Ruggieri provided him while in Rome in the early 1590s, and the tensions between the scholastic approach to evangelisation proposed in earlier chapters of the Bibliotheca selecta and the more extravagant typological strategies articulated in Ruggieri’s original manuscripts.

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The “Resposta breve” (Brief response, 1623–24) by Niccolò Longobardo was one of the most controversial documents ever penned in the Jesuit China mission. Longobardo criticized the use of indigenous Chinese vocabulary by Matteo Ricci to express Christian concepts as a perilous accommodation to diabolical monism. This article proposes a close reading of how Longobardo employed Scholastic, humanist, and Chinese sources to critique Ricci's disregard for the neo-Confucian interpreters in his reading of ancient Confucianism. It argues that Longobardo's polemic with Ricci was not theological in nature but reflected his distrust of philology in reconstructing the original meaning of ancient texts.

When European missionaries first entered Asia and the New World, they largely transposed to their new contexts European catechisms that assumed the intellectual passivity of the catechumen. The Jesuits, however, soon realized that such textual models would not be appropriate in East Asia which boasted its own sophisticated philosophical traditions. This article explores how Michele Ruggieri (1543–1607) deploys and adapts in his pioneering Chinese catechism, Tianzhu shilu 天主實錄 (The true record of the Lord of Heaven, 1584), innovations in the catechism genre that Jesuit missionaries had originally developed for Japan. By comparing Ruggieri’s arguments for the existence of God with those found in the Catechismus christianae fidei (Catechism of the Christian faith, 1586) composed by Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606) for the Japan mission, this article shows that Ruggieri lays the groundwork for a transcultural natural theology that de-emphasizes metaphysics in favour of arguments derived from a shared ethical understanding and political analogies.