The John Fryer Papers: State of the art and new perspectives

The John Fryer Papers (FP) are a fundamental archival resource. In the introduction of the article, the author briefly summarises the history of the FP and of their cataloguing; then, in the first chapter, he draws a brief summary of how the FP have been employed in secondary literature. In the second chapter, an outlook of the most important contents of the FP is sketched and further research perspectives are highlighted, with a particular focus on the fields of missionary linguistics and of cultural interactions between the West and China. In the third and last chapter, various questions about the FP are raised, especially pertaining to their cataloguing and preservation. The purpose of the article is to present the FP to a broad audience, giving a glance of their contents and highlighting possible research perspectives; the article represents a useful bibliographic instrument for research on John Fryer and, in a broader sense, on the Xixue Dongjian 西學東漸.