The year 2010 was marked by many cultural and religious initiatives commemorating the four-hundredth anniversary of Matteo Ricci's death in Beijing on May 11, 1610. Symposia and seminars, exhibitions, concerts, movies, and theater performances offered a multifaceted representation of the complex heritage left by this Jesuit humanist missionary who introduced Catholicism and Western sciences into Ming China. The diocese of Macerata (Italy), the town where Ricci was born on October 6, 1552, announced the reopening of the canonical process for his beatification. The past two years have seen a tremendous expansion of historical scholarship on Ricci: dozens of books, special journal issues, and scholarly articles have been published all over the world. This expansion of interest in Ricci is by no means new, but it gained momentum after an initial round of celebrations in his honor held in 1982, to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of his arrival in China (Macau)...

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