The Afterlife of Eurasian Long-distance Correspondence: From Jesuit Epistle to European Print

Abstract

This article carefully examines the long trajectory of a seventeenth-century letter in order to contribute to scholarship on the circulation and reproduction of information from Asia in European print in the early modern period. The letter was written by the Jesuit missionary and traveler Johann Grueber (1623–1680) to his colleague in Rome, the renowned scholar Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680). Spanning over a century of circulation and moving between the original context of Chinese missionary work in which the letter was composed and the scholarly networks throughout which it later circulated in Europe, the article elucidates the spread and evolution of Eurasian long-distance information in the early modern period, particularly between manuscript and print. It also examines how writers and publishers in Europe made selective use of the information within those manuscripts in their printed works, from the seventeenth century into the era of Enlightenment. The article thereby offers insights into questions of composition, authorship, reproduction, and distribution in the making of long-distance Eurasian information exchanges during the early modern period.