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Two Missionary Accounts of Southeast Asia in the Late Seventeenth Century
A Translation and Critical Edition of Guy Tachard’s Relation de Voyage aux Indes (1690–99) and Nicola Cima’s Relatione Distinta delli Regni di Siam, China, Tunchino, e Cocincina
Edited and translated by Stefan Halikowski Smith
Series: Connected Histories in the Early Modern World
264 Pages, Trim size: 156 x 234 mm
- Hardcover
- 9781641893183
- Published: December 2019
$150.00
£125.00
This volume presents critical editions of two previously unpublished missionary accounts of Ayutthaya and the East Indies scene after the "National" Revolution of 1688 in Thailand. The texts presented are Relation de Voyage aux Indes, 1690-99, by Guy Tachard, a French Jesuit; and Relatione Distinta delli Regni di Siam, China, Tunchino, e Cocincina (ca. 1707), by Nicola Cima, an Italian Augustinian. These interesting, substantial texts tell us a lot both about the Europeans who were writing them, and about Southeast Asia in a period when information was in much shorter supply than prior to 1688, and when kingdoms across Southeast Asia tended to retract from outward engagement and to become what historians have christened "hermit kingdoms." They are coloured by delusional thinking: in Tachard’s case of an active French colonial presence in that part of the world irrespective of the lessons of 1688-89, or in Cima’s case, of a revived Venetian maritime trade to the East Indies in an unlikely partnership with the Danish East Indies Company. Including a substantial introduction to contextualize the accounts, this book makes available in English some primary source material addressing important and overlooked aspects of the European missionary mentality.
List of Figures
Acknowledgements and aids to research
Brief chronology of the lives and movements of Guy Tachard, S.J. (1651-1712) and Nicola Agustin Cima, O.E.S.A. (1650-1722)
Introduction
Part I: Presentation of Guy Tachard S.J., Relation de Voyage aux Indes, 1690-99
Textual translation
Part II: Presentation of Nicola Cima O.E.S.A. Relatione Distinta delli Regni di Siam, China, Tunchino e Cocincina (ca. 1707)
Textual translation
Bibliography
Stefan Halikowski Smith is Associate Professor, Department of History at Swansea University
[These] two travel accounts are ... a rich canvas of events, places, actors, and curiosities encountered along the way. Both authors invent, lie, and misunderstand the situations, but the variety of details and their opinions are precious for understanding the European attitudes in the East and the strategies employed in intercultural encounters. The editor and translator, Halikowski Smith must be commended for [his] learned and polyglot commentaries and ample footnotes. They are a treasure trove for future research.
~Ines G. Županov, Journal of Jesuit Studies 9 (2022): 459–82
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