₱885
By Dolors Folch
Published by Vibal Group inc., ©2022.
As a privileged witness and participant of the early decades of Spanish colonization in the Philippines, the figure of Fray Martin de Rada starkly illuminates the tensions and patterns of behavior that would come to characterize Spain’s imperial efforts over the centuries to come. Though he is perhaps best remembered for his ambassadorial expedition to China in 1575, Rada also focused attention on the plight of native Filipinos during his twelve-year stay in the Philippines.
In this concise and enlightening biography, Delors Folch lays out the scope of Radas life and work, including his family origins and youth in Navarra; his scholarly work, on which basis he was selected to join the expedition to the Philippines of Miguel López de Legazpi and Andrés de Urdaneta his trip to Ming China, chronicled in his Relación; and the frustration and disillusionment of his final years as a witness to the harsh and confusing realities of Spanish conquest and evangelization in the sixteenth century.
Sinology owed us a definitive and detailed history of the Augustinian Martin de Rada and his great contribution to the knowledge on Mexico, the Philippines and most of all China in an epoch where only occasional reportage was available even when in 1575 Chiaa was already described as an advanced society. Without the steadfast and rigorous scholarship of Prof. Dolors Folch, Spanish history and its relations with China would be bereft.
–RAFAEL BUENO, Director of Politics, Society and Educational Programs, Casa Asia, Barcelona
The definitive biography of the scientist and Augustinian missionary from Navarra, Martin de Rada, from the rigorous and expert hand of a great connoisseur of his intellectuality, sojourns, and work in Mexico, the Philippines, and China of the sixteenth century.
–TACIANA FISAC, Center of East Asian Studies, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Dolors Folch i Fornesa is a Catalan sinologist and professor emeritus of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. She graduated with a history degree from the Universidad de Barcelona and received a doctorate in history at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona with the dissertation Barbarians, Borders, and Territory in the First Six Years of Sima Qian’s Historical Memoirs (published in 1993).
At Pompeu Fabra, she was the dean of the faculty of humanities, the coordinator of the East Asian Studies program, and professor of ancient history until she retired. Asa sinologist, she has researched the Ming dynasty and its relations with sixteenth-century Europe. She also established and headed the Escuela de Estudios de Asia Oriental. She has authored several publications including La fundació de l’imperi xinés (1991), El mundo chino (1991), The Sinological Materials of Some of the Spanish Libraries (1992), La construcció de Xina (2002), Els grans viatges de Zheng He (2008), and El umbral de la China Ming (202 1). In 2012 she was condecorated with the Creu de Sant Jordi award by the Catalonian government.
Description: 142 pages ; 25.2 x 17.8 cm
Language: English
ISBN 978-971-97-0805-6
In stock
