About

Eugenio Menegon is an Associate Professor of History at Boston University, specializing in Chinese-Western relations in late imperial times, Chinese religions and Christianity in China, Chinese science, and the intellectual history of Republican China. His research extensively explores the history of maritime Asia, Chinese food history, and intercultural relations in pre-modern times. Menegon has published two books: 'Un solo Cielo. Giulio Aleni S.J., 1582-1649. Geografia, arte, scienza, religione dall’Europa alla Cina' and 'Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China,' the latter receiving the 2011 Joseph Levenson Book Prize in Chinese Studies. His current book project examines the daily life and political networking of European residents at the Qing court in Beijing during the 17th-18th centuries. He is also a co-investigator for the digital humanities project China Historical Christian Database at the BU Center for Global Christianity and Mission.

Research topics

• History
• Archaeology
• Information Retrieval
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Humanities
• Geography
• Classics
• Literature
• Philosophy
• Business
• Linguistics
• Religious studies
• Art
• Database
• Theology

Selected publications

• The Tragic Jesuit Embassy of the Kangxi Emperor to Pope Clement XI, and the Lisbon Experience of “Imperial Envoy” Antonio Provana

  2025-05-28

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Introduction: from

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The China Historical Christian Database: A Dataset Quantifying Christianity in China from 1550 to 1950

  Data · 2024 · 1 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Information Retrieval
  • Computer Science
  • History

  The era of digitization is revolutionizing traditional humanities research, presenting both novel methodologies and challenges. This field harnesses quantitative techniques to yield groundbreaking insights, contingent upon comprehensive datasets on historical subjects. The China Historical Christian Database (CHCD) exemplifies this trend, furnishing researchers with a rich repository of historical, relational, and geographical data about Christianity in China from 1550 to 1950. The study of Christianity in China confronts formidable obstacles, including the mobility of historical agents, fluctuating relational networks, and linguistic disparities among scattered sources. The CHCD addresses these challenges by curating an open-access database built in neo4j that records information about Christian institutions in China and those that worked inside of them. Drawing on historical sources, the CHCD contains temporal, relational, and geographic data. The database currently has over 40,000 nodes and 200,000 relationships, and continues to grow. Beyond its utility for religious studies, the CHCD encompasses broader interdisciplinary inquiries including social network analysis, geospatial visualization, and economic modeling. This article introduces the CHCD’s structure, and explains the data collection and curation process.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• An Invisible City: Urban Life and Networks of European Missionaries and Christian Converts in Qing Beijing

  2024-07-27

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The famous Four Churches of Beijing, named after the four directions, comprised one Propaganda Fide and three Jesuit missionary centers and reflected diverse political, artistic, religious, and scientific agendas, producing different forms of exchange with the surrounding capital. They have been studied in recent years mainly from art historical and scientific perspectives, but their role as communitarian foci of religious and social life still needs exploration. A web of daily interactions with the local Christian communities and the members of the imperial court enveloped, connected, and separated the churches, the adjoining residences and facilities, the women’s chapels, and the small oratory and hostels in Haidian near the Yuanmingyuan suburban palace, in a hierarchy of varied importance and influence. Using internal missionary correspondence, this chapter offers a picture of the complex grid of relations surrounding the churches. These relations created physical and social spaces in Beijing and its hinterland, in what amounted, to quote Italo Calvino, to an “invisible city” within the capital.

  PublisherDOI

• «Robbe d’Europa»: Global Connections and the Mailing of Letters, Money, and Merchandise in the Eighteenth-Century China Mission

  Connessioni · 2023-01-01

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Manuscript reports and letters written in China by the Propaganda Fide and Jesuit missionaries criss-crossed the oceans and the continents to reach Europe on ships, carts, horses, mules, and palanquins, using both European systems of transportation provided by the various East India Companies and governments, and other local public and private postal arrangements. Missionary agencies also mailed from the West robbe d’Europa («European things»), such as silver coins, foodstuff and drugs (chocolate, wine, cheese, olive oil, tobacco), medicines, galanterie (luxury items), books, devotional objects and prints. Chinese goods (tea, silk, medicines, luxury items, books) were sent in the opposite direction to please patrons in Europe. Without this multi-layered, imperfect, yet workable mailing system, the flow of information and articles fuelling early modern globalisation and, within it, the Chinese missions, would have been impossible.

  PublisherDOI

• Local Religion in the Early Modern Period

  Böhlau Verlag eBooks · 2023-05-15

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Chinese Christianity as a Case StudyIn the villages, towns, and cities of Central Spain (and, I suspect, in most other nuclear settlements of Catholic Europe) there were two levels of Catholicism-that of the Church Universal, based on the sacraments, the Roman liturgy, and the Roman calendar; and a local one based on particular sacred places, images, and relics, locally chosen patron saints, idiosyncratic ceremonies, and a unique calendar built up from the settlement's own sacred history.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Acknowledgments

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2022

  • Political Science
  • History
  • Political Science
  DOI

• The Catholic Four-Character Classic (Tianzhu shengjiao sizi jingwen 天主聖教四字經文): A Confucian Pattern to Spread a Foreign Faith in Late Ming China

  L'Idomeneo · 2020 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Humanities
  • Literature
  • History

  The generation of missionaries which followed Ricci's method after his death in the 17th century, continued to work among the Chinese literati, producing a variety of religious, philosophical, and scientific treatises. Yet, the Jesuits, including Ricci himself, did not neglect the instruction of new converts through simpler text (doctrinae), devised to teach the Christian dogmas in a language that could be easily recited by those who could read, and memorized by the flock. One of the most well-known missionaries of the post-Ricci generation was the Italian Giulio Aleni (1582-1649), active in the southern provinces of Zhejiang and Fujian between the 1620s and 1649. Aleni was not only interested in converting the literati, but also tried, with the help of Chinese Christians, to build a strong local church at the popular level. Among his numerous works in Chinese, one which certainly bears witness to this evangelical effort at the grass root level is a booklet entitled The Four-Character Classic of the Holy Religion of the Lord of Heaven (Tianzhu shengjiao sizi jingwen, original ed. 1642; revised 1663 ed.). For whom was this Christian primer written? How was it used in religious education? How did it compare with similar texts in other religious traditions of China? These are questions I will try to answer in this essay.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• <i>Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia</i>. By Jürgen Osterhammel. Translated by Robert Savage. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. Pp. xvi+676. $35.00.

  The Journal of Modern History · 2020-11-16

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Traveled: A Seventeenth-Century Chinese Christian and His Conflicted Worlds. By Dominic Sachsenmaier. Columbia Studies in International and Global History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. xii + 268 pp. $60.00 cloth.

  Church History · 2020-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Traveled: A Seventeenth-Century Chinese Christian and His Conflicted Worlds. By Dominic Sachsenmaier. Columbia Studies in International and Global History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. xii + 268 pp. $60.00 cloth. - Volume 89 Issue 1

  PublisherDOI

• Amicitia Palatina : les jésuites et la politique des cadeaux offerts à la cour des Qing

  Extrême-Orient Extrême-Occident · 2019-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Amicitia palatina : les jésuites et la politique des cadeaux offerts à la cour des QingLes présents faits par les missionnaires catholiques européens à Pékin aux empereurs et aux membres des cours des Ming et des Qing constituaient un angle mort entre les échanges mutuels coutumiers entre fonctionnaires chinois, et les tributs offerts par les émissaires étrangers. Ils reflétaient également les manœuvres des acteurs européens et chinois au sein du gouvernement dans le cadre des politiques étatiques en matière de relations extérieures et de « corruption ». Cet article éclaire la politique et l’économie de l’échange de cadeaux au cours de la période Ming-Qing, ainsi qu’un point d’intersection entre les loisirs, le luxe et l’État.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Hang Xing

  State Key Laboratory of Chemobiosensing and Chemometrics

  10 shared

• Philip Thai

  10 shared

• Jamie Lochen

  Wesleyan University

  9 shared

• Olympia Sue

  Wesleyan University

  9 shared

• Amy Stanley

  9 shared

• Kyung-Lim White

  Wesleyan University

  9 shared

• Jesse Cromwell

  University of Mississippi

  9 shared

• Emma Alpert

  Wesleyan University

  9 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Chinese Studies

  Harvard University

  2009

• M.A., Chinese Studies

  Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

• B.A.

  University of Padua

Awards & honors

• 2011 Joseph Levenson Book Prize in Chinese Studies
• Research grants from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation (Taiwan…
• Research grants from the Ministry of Education of the Republ…
• Research grants from the National Endowment for the Humaniti…