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For the members of the Society of Jesus who assumed the personae studied in this book, the figures of the saintly mathematician, the apologetic voyager, the Jesuit academician, and even the edifying and curious épistolier constituted broadly recognizable and defensible modes of life that allowed them to make sense of their varied scientific activities in the mission fields. Neither dictated by institutional fiat nor fashioned at will, these collective identities emerged from the collaborative cobblings of Jesuits in both early modern Europe and late imperial China who sought to promote scientific specialization as part of an apostolic enterprise. In drawing on the spectacular mathematics popular in princely courts throughout the Holy Roman Empire, the dry observational protocols promoted by members of the Parisian Académie des sciences, a characteristically hagiographic form of personal providentialism, or the early modern travelogue's obsession with novelty, such image making was historically specific and socially complex in ways that the Pauline injunction to “become all things to all” could not anticipate.

Two important centers for translation, two major groups of translators, existed in France during the seventeenth century: the academicians and the Solitaires. The first group included Nicolas Perrot d'Ablancourt and the others associated with the Huit oraisons volume, while the second included the Messieurs, the solitary Gentlemen of the Jansenist retreat at Port-Royal. Both groups made a positive contribution to French language and culture—the academicians through their efforts to perfect and purify the language, and the Solitaires as theoreticians of general grammar (“Cartesian linguistics”) and as proponents of a “tragic vision” that characterized the century's final decades. Focusing on d'Ablancourt's circle and the Jansenist translators at Port-Royal, this chapter examines the role of translation in the constitution of French neoclassicism as well as the rise of the idea of the French language as “clear” and “universal,” but also subject to change. It first analyzes prefaces and related pieces by d'Ablancourt and his friends, before turning to the work of the Port-Royal translators, particularly the Bible translation project led by Isaac-Louis Le Maistre de Sacy.

Thomas Gouye's readerly reactions to the travelogues his confreres published in celebration of their journeys on behalf of the Parisian Académie des sciences extended well beyond a list of errata. As editor of the Observations physiques et mathematiques...envoyées...à l'Académie royale des sciences à Paris, par les peres jesuites—two iterations of which appeared in rapid succession, in 1688 and 1692—Gouye moved the astronomical “observations” and physical “remarks” named in the subtitles of Jesuit travelogue accounts to the fore, deftly recasting them into academic form. This chapter examines the academic collection as a mode of publication for the Jesuit missionary man of science. In publishing the results of their earlier journeys afield, Parisian academicians developed a characteristic mise-en-page, a spatial logic for disposing a particular traveler's remarks on the printed page according to the principles of a common and coherent observational regime. The chapter looks at how adoption of these textual and typographical conventions allowed China Jesuits to exhibit the refined observational sensibility and conception of collaborative science that together constituted their assumption of an academic persona.

With Thomas Gouye's publication of their scientific labors, China Jesuits finally achieved a textual presence appropriate to the academic persona they sought to embody. After returning to France in 1692 as procurator for the China mission, Louis Lecomte—one of the original mathématiciens du roi—presented the Académie des sciences with more astronomical observations, a map of Tartary, drawings of plants and fish, and accounts of the Jesuits' journeys, among other items. New recruits for the French Jesuit mission departed in great numbers in the late 1690s. Charles Le Gobien told Leibniz in 1698 that the Jesuit procurator at Paris for the missions, Antoine Verjus, had sent eighteen missionaries to China by various routes. This chapter takes up the later fortunes of Jesuit academicians, the limits of generic innovation for bending institutional boundaries, and the legacy of the academic collection in enabling Jesuit participation in European academic cultures from the other side of the early modern globe.