The early Jesuit mission in China (1579–1724) has long been recognized as an extraordinary case of intellectual apostolate. Yet only recently have we come to know many important details about the backbone of that Jesuit project: the massive and systematic importation of European books and scientific instruments into China by generations of Jesuits and their uses of those materials via their libraries inside China. This is largely thanks to the efforts of Noël Golvers, particularly the publication of his three-volume magnum opus, Libraries of Western Learning for China: Circulation of Western Books between Europe and China in the Jesuit Mission (ca. 1650–ca. 1750), Vol. 1: Logistics of Book Acquisition and Circulation; Vol. 2: Formation of Jesuit Libraries; Vol. 3: Of Books and Readers (Leuven: Ferdinand Verbiest Institute, 2012, 2013, and 2015). The volume under review is the result of his further research into the origins of the earliest, what he calls “the Trigault-Terrentius layer,” of those acquisitions, focusing on Jesuit Johann Schreck Terrentius (1576–1630) and his role in shaping the profile of that collection.

Through painstaking excavation and judicious analysis of archival as well as printed sources in Latin and multiple modern European languages, Golvers offers a richly informative and insightful study of Terrentius’s scholarly career before he embarked on the China mission in spring 1618, highlighting his encyclopedic learning, active research in multiple disciplines, and extensive social networking within the context of pursuing scholarship and procuring books and instruments for the China mission. The exquisite attention paid to Terrentius’s exchanges with nearly 150 individuals, including some of Europe’s best minds and most powerful patrons of his time, also gives the reader a unique, panoramic view of the vibrant, multifaceted, and multi-centered drama of “modern science” in the making during that critical juncture in early modern European history.

Born in the German town of Bingen, Johann Schreck took as his moniker “Terrentius,” which derived from the name of the prolific ancient Roman author Marcus Terentius Varro. He indeed matured into a scholar of wide-ranging talents and interests. During his formative years, from c.1590 to 1610, he toured around central and southern Europe, visiting some forty universities and colleges, teaching courses reportedly in twelve different disciplines, “distilling” chemicals, and meeting or corresponding with other scholars and experts. He was accepted as a member of the Lincean Academy (Accademia dei Lincei, established by Prince Federico Cesi in 1603) in May 1610, shortly after Galileo Galilei, only to leave it to join the Society of Jesus in November that same year. In late 1614, Jesuit Nicolas Trigault (1577–1628) arrived in Rome from China, having been dispatched by Nicolo Longobardo (1559–1654), successor of Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) as superior of the Jesuits in China, to propagandize for the China mission in Catholic Europe and to raise funds, recruit new missionaries (especially from among good mathematicians and astronomers), and acquire European books and instruments to establish Jesuit libraries in China. As one of the new recruits, Terrentius was selected to accompany Trigault on the second phase of his promotional tour through Europe, from 1616 to 1618, and, in particular, to oversee the procurement of books and instruments for the Jesuit libraries in China.

Golvers reconstructs Terrentius’s intellectual and social life during these two rounds of European tours as well as his stay in Rome in the intervening years (1611–15), drawing on several bodies of historical sources. The most important of these are seventy-one letters between Terrentius and several scholars, primarily his friend, physician and botanist Johann Faber (1574–1629), spanning the years from 1600 to 1624, which are preserved as part of the Fondo Faber, now held at Biblioteca dell’Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei e Corsiniana, and the previously unknown account books of Plantin Workshop (Officina Plantiniana) in Antwerp dated to the winter of 1616, which archived in great detail the purchase of some 331 titles of books that Trigault and Terrentius made there. In five chapters, augmented with thirty-eight beautiful illustrations and six appendices, the book takes the reader on a majestic tour across time and space, following Terrentius’s footsteps into his evolving life-world, visiting the places he had traveled to, meeting his friends, collaborators, acquaintances, and patrons, reviewing the books and instruments he had sought after and/or collected, and peeking into the scholastic and experimental projects he had carried out.

Our understanding of Terrentius as a scholar and Jesuit missionary is signifi cantly enriched in some ways and revised in others as a result of this spectacular encounter. We know that Terrentius wrote or collaborated on several Chinese works, all of which on scientific or technological subjects: Geyuan baxian biao 割圓八線表 (Trigonometric tables), Cetian yueshuo 測天約說 (Brief explana_tions about the measurement of the heavens); Dace 大測 (Great measurement); Huangchi zhengqiu黃赤正球 (Ecliptic and equatorial spheres); Huangchi dao judu biao黃赤道距度表 (Tables of the distances between the ecliptic and the Equator), Zhengqiu shengdu biao正球升度表 (Tables of the grades of the sphere), Yuanxi qiqi tushuo luzui 遠西奇器圖說錄最 (Collection of the best illustrations and descriptions of extraordinary devices of the Far West), and 泰西人身說概 (Theories about the human body in the Far West). Isaia Iannaccone, Erich Zettl, and others have demonstrated Terrentius’s extraordinary caliber for and dedication to scientific research in a variety of fields. For example, he performed autopsy on fellow Jesuit missionaries who had died of illnesses, including Sabatino de Ursis, to find out the underlying pathology, an act which must have irked his companions at his mission residence, as autopsy was barely tolerated by the Catholic Church and forbidden in China outside the penal context. He also continued his botanical research in China, having collected some eight thousand species to compile an encyclopedia, Plinius Indicus. He diligently studied Chinese medicine as well, from diagnostic methods to acupuncture, moxibustion, and materia medica, testing some local therapies on himself when sick; the last of such “clinical trials” killed him. (See Iannaccone’s recent article, “The Challenges of Accommodation: The Case of Niklaas Trigault and Johannes Schreck-Terrentius,” in Shu-Jyuan Deiwiks, Bernhard Führer, and Therese Geulen, eds., Europe Meets China—China Meets Europe: The Beginnings of European-Chinese Scientific Exchange in the 17th Century [Sankt Augustin: Institut Monumenta Serica, 2014], 17–42, esp. 30–36.)

What this present journey with Golvers has done is to allow the reader to see these qualities and pursuits of Terrentius against the backdrop of the dynamic, interconnected webs of interactions among the chief practitioners of early modern European science, technology, and medicine. Each web centered on a (cluster) of individuals at particular universities, academies, or courts, who worked on their own pet projects by applying their preferred approaches but also collaborated with, learned from, or engaged in polemic debates with practitioners from other webs. Golvers spotlighted alchemy and its application to medicine as a major anchor of Terrentius’s research, an indelible mark left on him by his early Wanderjahre at some of the Central European destinations, such as the University of Basel and the various German courts. Indeed, shortly before joining Trigault on his book procurement tour, in the winter of 1615 to be exact, Terrentius was still busy conducting alchemical experiments with his friend, German alchemist-pharmacist John Friedrich Eggs (1572–1638), in a (failed) attempt to produce medicines to expel kidney stones and treat gout for Leopold V of Austria in Zabern (1586–1632) and his confessor Henricus Vivarius (170–71). But Terrentius’s extensive travels at so many different centers of learning enabled him to traverse religious, ideological, and intellectual fault lines dividing contemporary Europeans—Catholic and Protestant; Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic; Ptolemaic, Copernican, and Tychonic; and Hippocratic/Galenic and Paracelsian/spagyric/iatrochemist; among others. As a result, he assembled a trove of knowledge, perspectives, and skills that was comprehensive, eclectic, and most up to date. Terrentius’s active research at the frontiers of alchemy, chemistry, medicine, botany, mathematics, and astronomy, preference for empirical and useful knowledge (see, for example, his praises for Vrancić’s illustrated books on engines, 356), and eagerness to acquire the latest technological equipment, such as Santorio Sanctorius’s (1561–1636) pulsilogium (244–45), strike this reviewer as the most remarkable traits of Terrentius that emerged from this study.

All in all, Golvers succeeds splendidly in depicting the multi-faceted intellectual personality of Terrentius, resolves several standing issues regarding the provenance of certain holdings in the former Jesuit-Lazarist libraries in Peking, and establishes a new monument in the historical study of the Jesuit mission in China, early modern European science, technology, and medicine, and the broader state of the Republic of Letters in the early seventeenth century.