Last Thursday evening a number of Glenn Fellows attended the 2010 Jefferson Lecture, delivered by Yale scholar Jonathan Spence, one of our leading experts on the history of China. Spence's lecture focused sharply on a letter of recommendation sent in July of 1687 by Thomas Hyde, librarian at the Bodleian, to the famous scientist, Robert Boyle. In it, Hyde made a case for Boyle to find time to meet a third man, a rather remarkable Chinese named Shen Fuzong.
In his introductory comments, Spence acknowledged that he has a tendency to focus on "small-scale happenings in circumscribed settings," justifying it in terms of teasing "a more expansive story" from an apparently prosaic artifact. I'm not certain how effectively Spence did this, though his parsing of the letter was fascinating, even charming. I'm also not certain that he fully succeeded in building a bridge between the world of humanities scholarship and public affairs, which the Jefferson Lecture is supposed to do, which makes sense when one considers that it is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Still, I found the event stimulating and a useful innoculation against the widespread notion that there were no important cultural encounters between East and West prior to the day before yesterday.
Read Spence's lecture here.
Read Serena Golden's review here.
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