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Matteo Ricci on the Web other pages Who was Matteo Ricci? Why is this web site named after Matteo Ricci? this page on the Web

I found only one website attempting to be all-things Ricci, but the site is in Italian and seems to have been abandoned before it got very far. I'm not going to try to replace it, but I am going to periodically search for new Ricci material and provide a central list of annotated URLs.

in print

Cronin, V. The Wise Man from the West (1955)
Gallagher, J. China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci, 1583-1610 (1953)
Spence, J.  The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (1984) - excerpt

In the print world, these three books cover Ricci's life and times well for the casual reader. Only excerpts are available online.  Spence's bibliography is the most complete print listing but now fiften years out of date. The 250+ entries fall into three groups:

texts written in Chinese

classic texts available on the Web and large print libraries, often translations, such as Augustine's Confessions, Rabelais' Gargantua, and The I Ching

books and journals, some of which may be available via inter-library loan, such as C.R. Boxer's "Mocambique Island as a Way-station for Portuguese East-Indiamen" in a 1962 issue of Mariners' Mirror

How many back copies of Mariners' Mirror are still available and in what condition forty years later? Forty years from now, what will be the availability and condition of today's scholarly publishing on the Web?

Although I haven't read it, I have heard from many people that Hannibal, Thomas Harris' sequel to Silence of the Lambs, has its hero deeply involved in Matteo Ricci's memory palaces.

on the Web

I did thorough Web searches for Matteo Ricci in Spring 1999 with the Copernic meta-search tool as well as several other search engines. It turned up several dozen pages. In July 2001, the search terms Matteo OR Ricci turn up over 14,000 results at Google. The bio on this site, RicciStreet.net, was the twentieth. Indicating the growth of the Web more than the growth of interest in Matteo Ricci, the search terms Matteo AND Ricci turned up over 5,000 pages. I looked at the first five hundred and sampled the later ones. Most are addresses and passing references. Many are in Italian, French, and Chinese.

A handful contributed to this Patron section of Ricci Street and they are referenced in context. Several had portraits and maps that I had not seen earlier. Many of the rest are courses at universities or brief, repetitive encyclopedia entries about Catholics, Jesuits, Italians, China, memory theaters, mathematicians, and astronomers. Some of them were at eLibrary, where you have to pay to access the content; I didn't.

Spence's The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci is for sale at Amazon.com and many other book-selling sites that the Google search turned up. The book is also on many university syllabi.

Here are the ones that caught my interest, especially those that express an opinion and aren't mentioned elsewhere on Ricci Street.

the Pope's Crossing the Threshold of Hope
a mention of Ricci's "bait-and-switch" (get them interested in your science to convert them to your religion) in Peter Nepstad's The Illuminated Lantern! about Chinese cinema
Ricci's influence on China's Jews and on the history of Chinese mathematics
Crater Riccius on the moon
Ricci's introduction of snuff bottles to China

domain names

MatteoRicci.com is registered to Virtualology, Inc., PO Box 623, Carnegie, PA 15106, U.S. They seem to be interested in selling it.

MatteoRicci.org is registered to Amministrazione Provinciale di Macerata, Matteo Ricci's birthplace in Italy.

RicciBase.com is registered to the Corporation of the Catholic, 3F, No.22, Sec.1 Hsin-hai Road Taipei, TW 100 Taiwan. However, I get only error messages when I try to view it.

Ann Geiger had a different experience:

I had to download the Chinese traditional text display support in order to view it (IE 55 automatically asked me if I wanted to download this because Install on Demand is checked in my internet options. You may not have had this Chinese file that allows you to display the page.

eponymous organizations

a Seattle prep school
a Seattle University college
a San Francisco cross-cultural institute
a Fordham graduate fellowship
the marketing management consultancy of one of his descendants, Laura Ricci
a Hong Kong college (what Americans would call a high school)
La Fondazione Matteo Ricci, an Italian site about traditional Chinese medicine, especially accupuncture

college paper mills

FastPapers.com will sell you "Chinese and European Culture: 'The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci'", touted as "a 5 page paper which discusses Chinese and European culture as presented in Jonathan D. Spence's book 'The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci.' No additional sources cited." You pay the low, low price of $9.85 per page, plus a dollar for emailing the whole paper or $8.95 for faxing it or $18.95 for FedEx next-day air service. A bargain, no doubt.

The same paper is available at Reportfinders.com and EssayGirl.com. Their Agreement states:

You agree that any paper sold to you represents an original work created by our company and provided only as a model paper for research use to be properly cited as one source in any original report on the same topic that you will ultimately go on to write yourself. The Paper Store Enterprises, Inc. will not -- under any circumstances -- tolerate any form of whole or partial plagiarism. All papers are guaranteed to reasonably match their catalog descriptions and are sold "as is" without any option for refund or credit.

postage stamps

I found only these two, issued recently by the Republic of China. Note the Great Wall behind Ricci. What is the astronomical instrument on the bluer stamp?

This image of the stamps also appears in Reliquary, a hypertext essay by Scott Bodenheimer.

A Korean religious cult

Several sources claim that until this century, no foreign name was as well known in China as "Li-ma-teu", Matteo Ricci. While that seemed like a nice sentiment, I didn't quite believe it until I found the ravings of a Korean who invokes poor Father Ricci like a demigod.

The Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci, who is revered by the spirits of Heaven and Earth

1 | Even though the people of the world do not know of the pious deeds of Matteo Ricci, the spirits of heaven and earth hold him dear. Matteo Ricci is in the highest position in the spiritual world and governs the spiritual world according to My order.

2 | At all times he is by My side, taking care of all matters. You shall revere him greatly.

3 | Matteo Ricci made the calendar of twenty-four periods and taught the world about the seasons. People have benefited from it ever since. ...

5 | Matteo Ricci came to the East in order to build a heavenly paradise on earth. However, he realized that this was not possible due to the persisting religious and political customs, which had been in place for generations. ...

7 | The pious works of Matteo Ricci fill heaven and earth. It is Matteo Ricci who lifted the boundaries between the spiritual worlds of heaven and earth, and enabled the spirits of East and West to cross over freely.