Rethinking Jesuits’ Responses to the Dream Cultures in Late Ming Dynasty

The Jesuits in late Ming China wrote extensively on dreams, exemplified in Francesco Sambiasi’s Lingyan lishao (灵言蠡勺, 1624) and Giulio Aleni’s Shengmeng ge (圣梦歌, 1637). Previous scholarship focuses on the Jesuits’ strategic adoption of Renaissance Scientia de anima in promoting Catholic missions in China. This presentation attempts to show the more reluctant and polemical sides of the Jesuits’ works on dreams, reading them as responses to and sometimes criticism of local dream cultures. The authors targeted not only the Neo-Confucian and Buddhist theories of dreams, which were well received by the Chinese literati. They also polemicized against more popularly rooted and “superstitious” beliefs, such as the concept of the “walking soul” (魂行) and the idea of “qi” (气) in traditional Chinese medicine. Meanwhile, back in Europe, the revolution of medical knowledge about the human body and blood circulation also challenged the authority of the Aristotelian science of the soul. Therefore, the controversies over dreams in late Ming China can be re-examined and understood as part of the global history of knowledge in the early modern period.