时间：2025年11月13日 13:00—14:30
地点：清华大学人文楼B206
主题：Taming the foreign falcon: Ludovico Buglio's Jincheng yinglun 进呈鹰论 and the translation of European falconry in the Qing dynasty
主讲人：Paolo De Troia (Sapienza University of Rome)
讲座摘要
This lecture takes falconry as a point of departure to explore the fascinating intersections between natural history and missionary scholarship in Qing China. It begins with a brief overview of the European history of falconry—from its medieval aristocratic traditions to its symbolic role in courtly life—before turning to its corresponding practices and cultural significance in the imperial Chinese context.
At the center of the discussion is the seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary Ludovico Buglio and his treatise A Presentation on Falcons 进呈鹰论, an ambitious attempt to translate European knowledge of falconry into Chinese. By analyzing this work, the lecture highlights the linguistic and conceptual challenges Buglio faced in rendering highly specialized terminology, techniques, and metaphors across distinct cultural and epistemological frameworks.
Finally, the lecture broadens the lens to consider issues of cross-cultural exchange and knowledge translation in the Qing dynasty more generally: How were European practices reinterpreted and adapted for Chinese audiences? And what does this process reveal about the complex dynamics of Jesuit cultural mediation between different worlds?
主讲人简介
Paolo De Troia, MA in Oriental Languages, obtained his PhD in Asian and African Civilisation at Sapienza University in 2003. During his training years, he specialised at Nanjing University and Beijing Normal University. His research interests and publications mainly focus on the history of Sino-Western contacts in science in the Ming era, from a cultural and lexical perspective. He currently serves as Associate Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the Department of Italian Institute of Oriental Studies at Sapienza University of Rome, where he teaches Chinese Language and Translation and Chinese Philology. He has to his credit numerous publications on the scientific production of the Jesuits of the Chinese mission in the 17th century, among the others an annotated edition of the geographical work Zhifang waiji (1623) of Giulio Aleni in 2009.
