This chapter explains the philological principles employed in our edition of Longobardo’s “Resposta breve.” In particular, it stresses our intention to represent as accurately as possible Longobardo’s intellectual contribution while giving a sense of how the text was manipulated during the Chinese Rites Controversies. For this reason, our edition has opted to base the English translation on Santa Maria’s Latin translation of Longobardo’s report located in the archives of Propaganda Fide in Rome (APF). This manuscript has been systematically compared against Longobardo’s Portuguese text, which has been reconstructed with Longobardo’s autograph (and significantly mutilated) manuscript found in APF and a copy of Longobardo’s text found in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). This chapter also provides an overview of the most important manuscript and printed copies of the text.

1. 1.

   Navarrete,Tratados históricos, 260.

2. 2.

   Navarrete, 268.

3. 3.

   Dehergne,Répertoire des Jésuites, 154.

4. 4.

   Navarrete, 250.

5. 5.

   Thierry Meynard, “Leibniz as Proponent of Neo-Confucianism in Europe,” inLeibniz and the European Encounter: 300 years of Discours sur la théologie naturelle des Chinois, ed. Li Wenchao 李文潮 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2017), 187.

Authors and Affiliations

1. University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany

   Claudia von Collani

2. Xue-Heng Institute for Advanced Studies, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

   Daniel Canaris

3. Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China

   Thierry Meynard

Corresponding author

Correspondence toClaudia von Collani.

Editors and Affiliations

1. Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China

   Thierry Meynard

2. Xue-Heng Institute for Advanced Studies, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

   Daniel Canaris

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