Books by Stuart M McManus 馬思途
Cambridge University Press, 2021
The global reach of the Spanish and Portuguese empires prompted a remarkable flourishing of the c... more The global reach of the Spanish and Portuguese empires prompted a remarkable flourishing of the classical rhetorical tradition in various parts of the early modern world. Empire of Eloquence is the first study to examine this tradition as part of a wider global renaissance in Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa, with a particular focus on the Iberian world. Spanning the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, the book argues that the classical rhetorical tradition contributed to the ideological coherence and equilibrium of this early modern Iberian world, providing important occasions for persuasion, legitimation and eventual (and perhaps inevitable) confrontation. Drawing on archival collections in thirteen countries, Stuart M. McManus places these developments in the context of civic, religious and institutional rituals attended by the multi-ethnic population of the Iberian world and beyond, and shows how they influenced public speaking in non-European languages, such as Konkani and Chinese.
CUHK Press (HK) distributed by Columbia University Press (USA), 2023
On the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2023, the U... more On the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2023, the University Library organized an exhibition and complied this commemorative volume to record and contextualize its burgeoning collection of Western rare books about China. This splendid volume features books, maps, and manuscripts from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Among its treasures are some of the very finest works of early Sinology. Many of these were written by celebrated Jesuit missionaries like Matteo Ricci and Johann Adam Schall von Bell, who almost single-handedly founded modern Sinology through their deep engagement with early modern Chinese society and culture. As the writings of these missionaries percolated back to Europe, knowledge about China grew exponentially as European books about China became more accurate and detailed. Through its extended introduction, images, and descriptions, this catalogue illustrates the dynamic early history of the West’s longstanding and profound interest in China, thereby giving members of the university community and the public at large an opportunity to consider how we might better “combine tradition with modernity and bring together China and the West.”
Harvard Oriental Series vol. 101. Cambridge MA: Harvard University, Department of South Asian Studies; Harvard University Press, 2024
The Ianua Indica (“Indian Gateway”) of Ignazio Arcamone S.J. (ca. 1615–83) is the first comparati... more The Ianua Indica (“Indian Gateway”) of Ignazio Arcamone S.J. (ca. 1615–83) is the first comparative grammar of two South Asian vernaculars (Konkani and Marathi). This volume offers a critical edition of the Latin original based on the two surviving manuscripts, a translation into English, and a selection of extracts from sources that shed light on its genesis and significance. It also features an extended introduction to this forgotten milestone in the history of Indology that outlines Arcamone’s reliance on the techniques of “Jesuit world philology” and the intellectual formation of its author in Italy and India.
Digital Humanities by Stuart M McManus 馬思途
Proceedings of ALT2023: First Workshop on Ancient Language Translation, 2023
The paper presents an investigation into the effectiveness of pre-trained language models, Siku-R... more The paper presents an investigation into the effectiveness of pre-trained language models, Siku-RoBERTa and RoBERTa, for Classical Chinese to Mandarin Chinese and Classical Chinese to English translation tasks. The English translation model resulted in unsatisfactory performance due to the small dataset, while the Mandarin Chinese model gave reasonable results.
Stuart M. McManus, Leo Tam, Yuji Li, Shuyang Qiu, Songyu Liu, Daniel Ng, Letian Yu (Chinese University of Hong Kong, Digital History Lab)
https://www.lib.cuhk.edu.hk/en/btcntw/
Acknowledgments
Without the generous help from the university library and the Information Technol... more Acknowledgments
Without the generous help from the university library and the Information Technology Service Centre, this project would not have been able to be created. The project team wishes to give special thanks to the library for patronising the scanning of the 55-volume Blair and Robertson books; Kitty Siu and Ella Fu from the university library for their inputs of copyright knowledge, and Judy Lo, Pui Lam So, HT Siu for their contributions to the IT aspect of this project. Most importantly, we would like to give special credits to the university for the Teaching Development and Language Enhancement Grant (TDLEG) for the funding of this project (project code: 4170623).
Project Team
Professor Ian Morley (PI)
Professor Stuart M. McManus (Co-PI)
Dr. Lee Hiu Hong Michael (Co-PI)
Yu Sze YUNG (Research assistant)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVBSoWSVrtI&t=2794s
Papers by Stuart M McManus 馬思途
American Historical Review, 2022
This article traces the origins of the Eurocentric vision of renaissance humanism and shows that ... more This article traces the origins of the Eurocentric vision of renaissance humanism and shows that the revival of letters in thirteenth-century Italy in fact had a much wider impact than traditionally thought. This “decolonized” vision of renaissance humanism is centered on three trends: imperial humanism (humanist ideas of empire, both within and beyond the metropole), Indo-humanism (syncretic humanisms, especially in Asia and the Americas), and post-humanism (the movement’s long shadow into the eighteenth century). When placed in this new light, the humanist movement emerges as neither purely chauvinistically imperialist and statist, nor graciously cosmopolitan and proto-liberal. Rather, it represented a toolbox of ideas and scholarly techniques that could be put to differing ends depending on the circumstances, while retaining certain common features that endured well into the age of “Enlightenment.” In making its argument about the past, present and future of the scholarship on renaissance humanism, this article also relies on a large corpus of little-known texts in various languages by a host of non- and extra-European humanists (indigenous, African, creole, missionary and diasporic).
Oxford Handbook of Jesuits, 2019
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 2022
This article offers a new approach to early modern global history dubbed (dis)entangled history a... more This article offers a new approach to early modern global history dubbed (dis)entangled history as a way to combine the conventional focus on the history of connections with a necessary appreciation of the elements of disconnection and disintegration. To exemplify this approach, it offers a case study related to the history of cannibalism as both a disputed anthropophagic practice and a cultural reference point across the early modern world. Through a rich multi-lingual and multimedia source base, we trace how the idea of Indigenous Tapuya endo-cannibalism in Brazil travelled across the Atlantic through Europe and Africa to East Asia. The idea of Tapuya cannibalism crossed some linguistic borders, stopped at others, and interacted unevenly with longstanding Ottoman, Polish, West African, Islamic, and Chinese ideas about ‘cannibal countries,’ of which it was just one more example. This trajectory challenges the historiographical consensus that early modern ideas about cannibalism were centred on the Atlantic world. By tracing how one particular discourse did and did not travel around the globe, this article offers not just a theoretical statement, but a ‘fleshed out’ and concrete approach to writing about intermittent connectedness during the period 1500 to 1800.
Gender & History, 2020
Whereas partus sequitur ventrem (“the birth follows the womb”) laws and their effects on the live... more Whereas partus sequitur ventrem (“the birth follows the womb”) laws and their effects on the lives of enslaved women and their children are well understood in the Atlantic context, they remain entirely unstudied in the case of the slave trade in Asia, in particular Portuguese Asia, the string of entrepôts between India and Japan. Focusing on Portuguese Asia between c. 1550 and 1750, this article relies on a little-known corpus of manuscript treatises on slavery alongside baptismal records, manumission letters and other archival documents to argue that Jesuit missionaries built on the longstanding and varied legal tradition that they had inherited to create a mixed descriptive-prescriptive framework for understanding and regulating the hereditability of slavery in Asia, which simultaneously admitted departures from partus sequitur ventrem, including Chinese, Japanese and Mughal slavery. This theoretical framework reflected (and to some degree created) the reality on the ground, although the lives of enslaved women were inevitably also shaped by factors that the Jesuits did not fully comprehend, such as Chinese conventions surrounding female bondservants and the seemingly divergent manumission rates of different ethnic groups.
Harvard Journal of Asiastic Studies , 2021
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/868800
On September 12, 1672, an eighteen-year-old Chinese "slave... more https://muse.jhu.edu/article/868800
On September 12, 1672, an eighteen-year-old Chinese "slave" later named Ângela was sold by a low-level Qing official to a Portuguese merchant at Macau's northern gate, or so her limited-term servitude certificate claimed. At that moment, Ângela moved from one part of a loosely integrated global market to another, crossing linguistic and cultural boundaries that shaped both her legal status and lived experience. This was facilitated by fundamental similarities in the ways human beings were commodified in the Iberian world and early Qing China, which were in turn undergirded by overlapping ideas about degraded status and loosely equivalent customs surrounding property and contracts. As a contribution to the global history of early modern slavery, this article explores the limits of such commensurability and what it might have meant for Chinese women in Macau like Ângela making extensive use of both Chinese and Western sources.
Glossae: European Journal of Legal History, 2022
This research note argues that late-medieval notarial culture had an important influence on the g... more This research note argues that late-medieval notarial culture had an important influence on the genesis of humanist political thought. In particular, it shows that the definition of a "republic" (respublica) put forward by the Milanese notary and humanist Uberto Decembrio borrowed from legal ideas about corporations (universitates), which included respublicae. Combining Platonic ideas with echoes of learned legal texts and observations on the legal reality, Decembrio put forward a semi-idealized vision of his monarchical city-state.
Colonial Latin American Review, 2018
English Historical Review, 2022
Hispanic American Historical Review, 2018
This article offers a reassessment of the Bibliotheca Mexicana controversy (ca. 1745-1755), a key... more This article offers a reassessment of the Bibliotheca Mexicana controversy (ca. 1745-1755), a key moment in the development of "creole patriotism" as most famously articulated by David A. Brading in The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State 1492-1867 (1991). Through a rereading of the original sources and a reconstruction of the historiographical origins of creole patriotism in German existentialism, the article argues that the identity of the New World protagonists in the controversy had little to do with either creolism or protonationalist patriotism. These creole and peninsular "Mexicans" (Mexicani) certainly felt pride in their flourishing urban center of Mexico City and its dependent territories. However, this patria was analogous to early modern city-states, like the Duchy of Milan, rather than to modern nation-states, like Mexico. This local identity was also entirely compatible with a strong loyalty to the Hispanic Monarchy, a larger pan-Hispanic caste identity, and a sense of membership in the Catholic Republic of Letters.
New England Quarterly, 2021
This article reconstructs the intellectual, educational and ritual contexts that produced the fir... more This article reconstructs the intellectual, educational and ritual contexts that produced the first Boston Massacre Oration delivered by James Lovell (1737-1814) in 1771. Relying on untapped sources, it argues that although Lovell’s ideas may have been revolutionary and at least minimally Christian, his rhetorical education and oratorical practice were primarily an offshoot of a classicizing renaissance tradition transmitted by the colonial colleges that faded, blurred and was repurposed in the eighteenth century.
KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge, 2019
the chinese university of hong kong S itting in the walled city of Manila in the last decade of t... more the chinese university of hong kong S itting in the walled city of Manila in the last decade of the sixteenth century, an anonymous, probably Mexican-born Spaniard looked at the city's growing Japanese population and saw the Romans:
Bulletin of Portuguese / Japanese Studies, , 2018
In 1599, Gaspar Fernandes, a Japanese slave from Bungo, petitioned for his freedom in Mexico City... more In 1599, Gaspar Fernandes, a Japanese slave from Bungo, petitioned for his freedom in Mexico City. During the course of the trial, it was revealed that his master's claim to him rested on a limited-term servitude certificate issued by a Jesuit missionary in Nagasaki, a type of legal instrument that remains poorly understood by historians of slavery. This article discusses contemporary understandings of this controversial system with reference to a new source on slavery in Iberian Asia, Gomes Vaz's De mancipiis Indicis (c. 1610). While admitting that it was an usual arrangement and that the edicts of Dom Sebastião and Hideyoshi in combination with a decree of excommunication by the Bishop of Japan had since rendered all Japanese slavery unlawful, Vaz accepted the system in principle as compatable with Japanese law, the ius commune, Portuguese law, Castilian law and the wide-ranging thought of the School of Salamanca, sources that he cites as part of his larger comparative legal project. In the end, Vaz concludes that the schedulae issued in early modern Nagasaki were an entirely explicable, if at the time of writing no longer acceptable, legal instrument that also served the pragmatic function of lessening the burden of slavery in an important missionary context by regulating it bureaucratically and limiting it in time. He also saw it as a creating an intermediate condition between slavery and freedom that was analogous, but not quite identical to that of servants and indentured youths in the Iberian World.
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Books by Stuart M McManus 馬思途
Digital Humanities by Stuart M McManus 馬思途
Stuart M. McManus, Leo Tam, Yuji Li, Shuyang Qiu, Songyu Liu, Daniel Ng, Letian Yu (Chinese University of Hong Kong, Digital History Lab)
Final project: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCM2xX6PoZyNiXCuemT0F0hw
Without the generous help from the university library and the Information Technology Service Centre, this project would not have been able to be created. The project team wishes to give special thanks to the library for patronising the scanning of the 55-volume Blair and Robertson books; Kitty Siu and Ella Fu from the university library for their inputs of copyright knowledge, and Judy Lo, Pui Lam So, HT Siu for their contributions to the IT aspect of this project. Most importantly, we would like to give special credits to the university for the Teaching Development and Language Enhancement Grant (TDLEG) for the funding of this project (project code: 4170623).
Project Team
Professor Ian Morley (PI)
Professor Stuart M. McManus (Co-PI)
Dr. Lee Hiu Hong Michael (Co-PI)
Yu Sze YUNG (Research assistant)
Papers by Stuart M McManus 馬思途
On September 12, 1672, an eighteen-year-old Chinese "slave" later named Ângela was sold by a low-level Qing official to a Portuguese merchant at Macau's northern gate, or so her limited-term servitude certificate claimed. At that moment, Ângela moved from one part of a loosely integrated global market to another, crossing linguistic and cultural boundaries that shaped both her legal status and lived experience. This was facilitated by fundamental similarities in the ways human beings were commodified in the Iberian world and early Qing China, which were in turn undergirded by overlapping ideas about degraded status and loosely equivalent customs surrounding property and contracts. As a contribution to the global history of early modern slavery, this article explores the limits of such commensurability and what it might have meant for Chinese women in Macau like Ângela making extensive use of both Chinese and Western sources.
Stuart M. McManus, Leo Tam, Yuji Li, Shuyang Qiu, Songyu Liu, Daniel Ng, Letian Yu (Chinese University of Hong Kong, Digital History Lab)
Final project: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCM2xX6PoZyNiXCuemT0F0hw
Without the generous help from the university library and the Information Technology Service Centre, this project would not have been able to be created. The project team wishes to give special thanks to the library for patronising the scanning of the 55-volume Blair and Robertson books; Kitty Siu and Ella Fu from the university library for their inputs of copyright knowledge, and Judy Lo, Pui Lam So, HT Siu for their contributions to the IT aspect of this project. Most importantly, we would like to give special credits to the university for the Teaching Development and Language Enhancement Grant (TDLEG) for the funding of this project (project code: 4170623).
Project Team
Professor Ian Morley (PI)
Professor Stuart M. McManus (Co-PI)
Dr. Lee Hiu Hong Michael (Co-PI)
Yu Sze YUNG (Research assistant)
On September 12, 1672, an eighteen-year-old Chinese "slave" later named Ângela was sold by a low-level Qing official to a Portuguese merchant at Macau's northern gate, or so her limited-term servitude certificate claimed. At that moment, Ângela moved from one part of a loosely integrated global market to another, crossing linguistic and cultural boundaries that shaped both her legal status and lived experience. This was facilitated by fundamental similarities in the ways human beings were commodified in the Iberian world and early Qing China, which were in turn undergirded by overlapping ideas about degraded status and loosely equivalent customs surrounding property and contracts. As a contribution to the global history of early modern slavery, this article explores the limits of such commensurability and what it might have meant for Chinese women in Macau like Ângela making extensive use of both Chinese and Western sources.