Manhattan D.A. Returns Stolen Jesuit Scientific Texts and Antiquities to Italy and the Vatican
A cluster of rare books once used to translate Western science for China’s Confucian elite has become the latest focus of New York’s intensifying campaign against cultural property trafficking.
This week, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office returned 17 stolen antiquities and rare books, collectively valued at more than $1.5 million, to Italy and the Vatican during a restitution ceremony in New York. In a statement, the D.A.’s office said the objects were recovered through “multiple investigations into antiquities trafficking networks.”
The most distinctive items in the handover were six Chinese-language books, largely devoted to scientific subjects, written by Jesuit clerics in the 16th and 17th centuries. The volumes are among approximately 40 similar books stolen from the Archives of the Society of Jesus in Vatican City sometime between 1999 and 2002.
The texts date to a period when Jesuit missionaries were central to the Catholic Church’s efforts to establish a presence in Asia. Beginning with the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci in 1582, emissaries to China pursued a strategy that paired evangelization with the transmission of European knowledge. They translated treatises on astronomy, mathematics, cartography, and related fields from Latin, tailoring them for educated readers within the Confucian scholarly class.
According to the D.A.’s office, the six books were last documented in the Vatican archives in the early 1970s. They later appeared on the antiquarian book market in London in 2000. After being purchased by a private collector, the books were loaned to the University of Notre Dame. Investigators seized them in late 2025.
The restitution also included objects spanning a wide range of periods and collecting contexts. Among them was a 1525 letter from Alfonso I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, addressed to Lodovico Ariosto, then Governor of the Province of Garfagnana. The letter was seized from the Morgan Library.
Several additional items were recovered from the Metropolitan Museum, including two Greek ceramic drinking cups dating to about 500 BC, as first reported by the New York Times.
The return adds to the growing record of the Manhattan D.A.’s Office Antiquities Trafficking Unit, established in 2017. Since its founding, the unit has convicted 18 individuals in cultural property-related cases, recovered more than 6,200 antiquities valued at more than $485 million, and returned more than 5,860 objects to 36 countries.
As museums, libraries, and private collectors face heightened scrutiny over provenance, the latest handover underscores how trafficking investigations increasingly reach beyond sculpture and ceramics to include rare books and archival material — objects whose value lies as much in intellectual history as in the market itself.
