Ma Xiangbo was born in 1840 and became a pioneer of educational reform during the republican period. He was responsible for introducing the idea that science and humanities should be valued equally in liberal arts education, a concept that became key to the model of university education. Ma's view of education combined Western humanism and science…

Sustained by rich archival and published material, this paper describes the experience of Father Matteo Ricci in China in the perspective of the general evolution of the Church and European Catholicism between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Father Matteo Ricci's missionary works are re-read in the light of the more complex urgencies…