14 Theological librarianship • Vol. 12, No. 1 april 2019

show up in the archival materials that are on display here at the exhibit? What do we discover about African Christianity – or anything else – that we are not really meant to discover as we walk around the room? How can we learn something by missing the point of the display?

In display case #12, there is a helpful explanation about frequent religious and diplomatic encounters between Africans and Europeans from the late 13 th to the 15 th centuries. In the labels in the case, visitors are told that, “Ethiopian monks traveled to Europe and were treated as diplomats and intellectuals, prestigious sources of knowledge on topics including theology, linguistics, and geography.” The illuminating information about Ethiopians and Europeans ends with a passing comment that is attributed to “historian Matteo Ricci (1552-1610).” Now Matteo Ricci was the pioneer Jesuit missionary to China, and the most famous, radical and controversial European translator and adapter of Christianity in China. Curious, I emailed curator Jennifer Aycock to ask her about the Ricci attribution. Back came the reply: the name is supposed to be Matteo Salvadore, not Matteo Ricci. Ah, no connection between Ethiopia and China here. But then I saw that in the same display case #12, there is a beautiful polyglot psalter from 1518, open to a page where a portion of Psalm 68 is written in four columns of Latin, Ge’ez, Greek, and Hebrew. The Psalm is significant; 68:31 says that “Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hand to God” (KJV). This particular psalter was compiled by Johannes Potken (c. 1470-c. 1525) of Cologne, who had heard monks chanting in Ge’ez in Rome, and he set out to learn this language. Now it turns out that Ricci had also studied law in Rome, fifty years after the publication of Potken’s psalter. Being a humanist scholar, Ricci would probably have seen texts in Ge’ez, and likely even seen Ethiopian monks as Potken had. In this way he would have come across a tradition of Christianity that was quite radically different from European Catholicism. Could a group of Ethiopian monks in Rome have been one of the sparks that lit the fire of Ricci’s imagination as he translated and radically adapted Christianity to China?

Let us look closely at this polyglot psalter.4 In between each beautifully scripted column of the psalm is, as we would expect, blank space. Blank space is indispensable for writing, as silence is for music: you cannot have the latter without the former. Yet one wonders what those blank spaces, those gaps between languages, signified for Potken. Surely, they were not simply gaps for the convenience of writing. They also signified cultural gaps, racial gaps, ecclesial gaps, even theological gaps. Does the fact that Potken arranged the scripts side-by-side mean that he saw the different worlds of the different languages as equivalents? Or was he merely following literary and sacred convention, which visually implied that very different expressions of the faith were equivalent, and not hierarchically related? In any case, it was just such parallel gaps and silences between different linguistic and cultural worlds that allowed Ricci and other Jesuits in the early modern era to engage in their experiments of radical adaptation of Christianity to Asian contexts. Metaphorically speaking, Ricci and his confreres added a column of Chinese alongside the columns of Hebrew, Ge’ez, Greek and Latin. And so, an unintentional, no doubt embarrassing but also fortuitous, typographical error in a display case has provided for me a crack in the parchment curtain of these archives, to see a 16 th century connection between African and Asian Christianity, via Roman Christianity.

There is a second question I would like to raise this evening that this exhibit prompts. There has been quite a good deal of historical work done on missionary and other exhibitions in the 19 th and 20 th centuries. One exemplary exhibition occurred almost a century ago, when, during the summer of 1919 in Columbus, Ohio, American Methodists put on “an enormous missionary exposition dubbed ‘The Centenary Celebration of American Methodist Missions.’”5 One of the many things that strike us, those who look back at exhibitions such as these, is how they reflected the thinking of their era. So, we pay attention to how they portrayed different races and nationalities, how they constructed gender, and the assumptions they held about social classes and even whole societies. What becomes clear from these exhibitions is that what people choose to

4 This particular psalter is call number 1518 BIBL in Pitts Theology Library’s collection.

5 Christopher J. Anderson, The Centenary Celebration of American Methodist Missions (Lewistown: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2012), 1.