Parents, children, mutual duties and relations: a European way of governing the family in a late Ming socio-cultural context

This paper proposes to examine the representations of parents and children, along with their duties and relations, as portrayed in Alfonso Vagnone S.J.’s (1568-1640) treatises Tongyou jiaoyu 童幼教育 (On the Education of Children, c. 1632) and Qijia Xixue 齊家西學 (On Governing the Family in the West, c. 1635). In particular, this study will highlight the most relevant moral exhortations that Vagnone addressed to parents and children and will discuss them in the broader context of the late Ming society and literary trends. Such an investigation aims at defining the family model that was presented to the late Ming literati and at comparing it with the depictions in the Song-Ming booklets o f family instructions (jiaxun 家訓).