The memory palace of Matteo Ricci,

In the book the memory palace of Matteo Ricci, the author Jonathan Spence talks about the Italian preacher Matteo Ricci who spent almost his whole life in China. Spence tries to describe a person who was determined and underwent many difficulties in preaching but never lost his faith in establishing Christian faith among Chinese people by using the memory palace. He divided the book into nine chapters. Despite the preface and the summary of the memory palace, each chapter contains an image or picture which is used for introduction of each chapter. In this way, Spence uses these images and pictures to help the reader build their own memory palace of this book which also well-illustrated the memory method that Matteo Ricci had used – the memory palace. According to Brook (p.831), a memory palace is “a mnemonic method that was popular with sixteenth-century Jesuits for retaining in memory.”

In the book, Matteo Ricci, a pious Christian, tried to impress the Chinese by using his memory skills. He also hoped that they can be interested in his culture and thus interested in God (p. 140). Under that time fierce political and financial situation and religious fermentation, it was really tough for Ricci and other preachers to preach in China. In order to reach goal which make the people in China believe in god, they went through a lot of difficulties. But also because of these difficulties, they shattered Ricci’s original dream which was easy to preaching in a different country into pieces. Ricci and others thus tried to find another accessible and more realistic way to achieve their goals.

One way to approach their goals was translating the thoughts and books in European to Chinese and made the people have access to understand knowledge...

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...he conscious intentionality of work and Ricci’s exploitation of his subject matter for Christian purpose.” (Brook, p.832)That meant because Ricci had his own Christian purpose to tell the story in such way, it was not respectful to Ricci’s original intention when Spence told the reader the facts.

Despites those small shortcomings, Spence did a really good job in portraying the historical figure Ricci. He provided the background and early life of Ricci to tell us why he was determined to preach outside. The most important part was he illustrated every effort that Ricci had made to introduce Western memory method and the Christian religion to the Chinese people such as translation and building the memory palace. Just as Brook said, “Spence is able to reveal to us a somewhat temperamental man keenly sensitive to his difficulties, his failures.”(Brook, p.833)