This is an important work on two counts, both as an edition of Friar Domingo Navarrete’s writings and for Mr. Cummins’ learned monograph on Navarrete’s role in the Chinese Rites controversy. Friar Domingo Navarrete, a Spanish Dominican missionary who died archbishop of Santo Domingo, spent a decade from 1658 to 1669 in China where he became a determined enemy of the ‘Jesuit mandarins.’ Involved in this clash was not only the correct Chinese word for the Deity but also a dispute about the religious significance of the ancestor veneration ceremonies of the Chinese. In their determination to convert the mandarins and the literati of China the Jesuits were prepared to make significant concessions. Under the skilled leadership of Matteo Ricci, the majority of the Jesuits decided that the Rites ceremonies were certainly not idolatrous and probably not superstitious. In their initial presentation the Jesuits deemphasized certain aspects of the Catholic doctrine such as the Crucifixion and some of the sacraments, although these matters were ultimately explained to the converts.

In addition to providing us in English with a meticulously edited selection of Navarrete’s writings (the only major Spanish contribution to the Chinese cult of 18th-century Europe), Mr. Cummins has reconstructed with skill and imagination the point of view of the friars. His conclusion is that the Dominican critique of the Jesuits was not merely the expression of ecclesiastical obscurantism and an intransigent unwillingness to compromise, but that the Dominican fears about the Jesuit methods were reasonable and to some extent justified in the context of the seventeenth-century Catholic world. Mr. Cummins never allows his revisionism to overwhelm him. He is candid and objective in his discussion of Navarrete, pointing out those situations where he was slanderous, irrational, or contradictory. His interpretation of the Jesuit viewpoint is a model of objectivity.

The net result is that the author has made a truly original and responsible contribution. The Chinese Rites controversy is a dispute which should interest the historians of colonial Spanish and Portuguese America, if only for the sharp contrasts facing the Catholic missionaries in the task of converting the peoples of China and America.