The Verbiest Institute in Leuven was named after the Belgian Jesuit missionary Ferdinand Verbiest, who was born in Pittem, Belgium, in 1623. From the beginning, research on Ferdinand Verbiest, and his fellow missionaries from the 17^de century, was one of the research fields in which the Verbiest Institute wanted to engage in.

This book contains 23 essays, the result of Noël Golvers’ research of the 35 years between the commemoration of the 300th anniversary of Verbiest’s decease in 1988 and the celebration of the 400^th anniversary of his birthday on 9 February 2023. They are focusing on 23 less studied aspects of his life and work, and are complementing his previous editions of Verbiest’s main Western publications, viz. his Astronomia Europaea (ed. 1991) and his astronomical corpus, including the ‘Athenian texts’ Compendium Historicum and Mechanica (with Efthymios Nicolaidis, 2009), his Correspondence (2017) and his Postulata Vice-Provinciae Sinensis in Urbe proponenda (2018), which delivered the main sources for the 23 essays. The author grouped these essays around various aspects of Verbiest’s life and work: his formation; his multiform competences unfolded in China, far exceeding the profile of the ‘‘astronomer of the Emperor’; his notable concern with the (institutional and geostrategic) position of the China mission; his attention for a wide-ranging, even ambitious and complex-free networking by means of correspondence and textual or figurative presents, and, last but not least, the reception and impact of his works and ideas in contemporary Europe. In the China mission, he was in the years 1660-1688 a central figure (“columen missionis”), connected through his ‘mentor’, Adam Schall von Bell (d. 1666) to the generation of predecessors such as Johann Schreck Terrentius (d. 1630), calendar calculator and ‘engineer’. With these 23 intersections Noël Golvers’ research is moving on the crossroad between mission history, history of science and book history. The 17^th century mission, especially in China – perceived by the Jesuits as the most extreme among their missions, but also as the most adapted to their own inspiration and institution – was indeed a very fertile framework for various forms of intercultural contacts, meetings and scholarly-scientific communication.

https://www.kuleuven.be/verbiest/publications/lcs/lcs45