Around 1700, several major political and religious controversies were troubling the courts of Europe as well as the Republic of Letters. A new vision of the Orient was emerging with the help of empiricist study of the religion of the Eastern Churches. This was linked to the West’s own disputes between Huguenots, royal Catholics and the less royal and less Catholic Jansenists in France, between episcopalists, Presbyterians, jurors and non-jurors in England before and after the Glorious Revolution. At the same time, starting in the mid-1680s, for the first time, the Far East became a major political affair across Europe during the so-called debate about the Chinese ceremonies and the choices to be taken regarding the Jesuit Mission to China. Also at the same time, on the level of historico-philosophical debates, the Querelle des Anciens et des modernes took off, and in historical chronology and geological sciences, debates about the synchronization of the different civilizations of the world as well as disputes about the shape and age of the earth took place. This all seems to belong to very different histories, but many intellectuals, like Eusèbe Renaudot, were actors in all those fields. He can thus serve like a prismatic reflector to make understand the links between those epistemic fields and intersections. We can understand, how the mental maps of the early enlightenment were reconfigured, how even something like a ´Middle East´ emerged as an actor eventually opposed to ´(Chinese) Asia´, how the discovery of the medieval Nestorian mission of China could serve ideological purposes around 1700 and how the Querelle des Anciens et des modernes was transformed into a comparison between civilizations across time and global space.
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