Approaching writing as a form of cultural practice and understanding text as an historical object, this book not only recovers elements of the ritual practice of Middle-Period weddings, but also reassesses the relationship between texts and the Middle-Period past. Its fourfold narrative of the writing of weddings and its spirited engagement with the texts—ritual manuals, engagement letters, nuptial songs, calendars and almanacs, and legal texts—offer a form and style for a cultural history that accommodates the particularities of the sources of the Chinese imperial past.
The Mongol conquest of China in the thirteenth century and Khubilai Khan’s founding of the Yuan dynasty brought together under one government people of different languages, religions, and social customs. Chinese law evolved rapidly to accommodate these changes, as reflected in the great compendium Yuan dianzhang (Statutes and Precedents of the Yuan Dynasty). The records of legal cases contained in this seminal text, Bettine Birge shows, paint a portrait of medieval Chinese family life—and the conflicts that arose from it—that is unmatched by any other historical source. Marriage and the Law in the Age of Khubilai Khan reveals the complex, sometimes contradictory inner workings of the Mongol-Yuan legal system, seen through the prism of marriage disputes in chapter eighteen of the Yuan dianzhang, which has never before been translated into another language. Birge’s meticulously annotated translation clarifies the meaning of terms and passages, some in a hybrid Sino-Mongolian language, for specialists and general readers alike. The text includes court testimony—recorded in the vivid vernacular of people from all social classes—in lawsuits over adultery, divorce, rape, wife-selling, marriages of runaway slaves, and other conflicts. It brings us closer than any other source to the actual Mongolian speech of Khubilai and the great khans who succeeded him as they struggled to reconcile very different Mongol, Muslim, and Chinese legal traditions and confront the challenges of ruling a diverse polyethnic empire.
Until the 1980s, a common narrative about women in China had been one of victimization: women had dutifully endured a patriarchal civilization for thousands of years, living cloistered, uneducated lives separate from the larger social and cultural world, until they were liberated by political upheavals in the twentieth century. Rich scholarship on gender in China has since complicated the picture of women in Chinese society, revealing the roles women have played as active agents in their families, businesses, and artistic communities. The essays in this collection go further by assessing the ways in which the study of gender has changed our understanding of Chinese history and showing how the study of gender in China challenges our assumptions about China, the past, and gender itself.
The crucial period of Chinese history, 168-979, falls naturally into contrasting phases. The first phase, also known as that of 'early medieval China,' is an age of political decentralization. Following the breakup of the Han empire, China was plunged into civil war and fragmentation and stayed divided for nearly four centuries. The second phase started in 589, during the Sui dynasty, when China was once again brought under a single government. Under the Sui, the bureaucracy was revitalized, the military strengthened, and the taxation system reformed. The fall of the Sui in 618 gave way to the even stronger Tang dynasty, which represents an apogee of traditional Chinese civilization. Inheriting all the great institutions developed under the Sui, the Tang made great achievements in poetry, painting, music, and architecture. The An Lushan rebellion, which also took place during Tang rule, brought about far-reaching changes in the socioeconomic, political, and military arenas. What transpired in the second half of the Tang and the ensuing Five Dynasties provided the foundation for the next age of late imperial China. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Medieval China contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1000 cross-referenced entries on historical figure. It expands on existing thematic entries, and adds a number of new ones with substantial content, including those on nobility, art, architecture, archaeology, economy, agriculture, money, population, cities, literature, historiography, military, religion, Persia, India, Japan, Korea, Arabs, and Byzantium, among others. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about medieval China.
This essential reference work provides an alphabetic listing, with an extensive "index," of studies on women in China from earliest times to the present day written in Western languages, primarily English, French, German, and Italian. Containing more than 2500 citations of books, chapters in books, and articles, especially those published in the last thirty years, and more than 100 titles of doctoral dissertations and Masters theses, it covers works written in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology; art and archaeology; demography; economics; education; fashion; film and media studies; history; interdisciplinary studies; law; literature; music; medicine, science, and technology; political science; and religion and philosophy. It also contains many citations of studies of women in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Love stories formed a major part of the classical short story genre in China from as early as the eighth century, when men of letters began to write about romantic encounters. In later centuries, such stories provided inspiration for several new literary genres. While much scholarly attention has been focused on the short story of both the medieval and late imperial eras, comparatively little work has been attempted on the interim stage, the Song and Yuan dynasties, which spanned some five hundred years from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries. Yet this was a crucial developmental period for many forms of narrative literature—so much so that any understanding of late imperial narrative should be informed by the earlier tradition. The first study of its kind in English, The Chinese Love Story from the Tenth to the Fourteenth Century traces the development of the love story throughout this important yet overlooked era. Using Tang dynasty stories as a point of comparison, Alister D. Inglis examines and appraises key new themes, paying special attention to period hallmarks, gender portrayal, and textuality. Inglis demonstrates that, contrary to received scholarly wisdom, this was a highly innovative period during which writers and storytellers laid a fertile foundation for the literature of late imperial China.
A History of Chinese Letters and Epistolary Culture is the first publication, in any language, that is dedicated to the study of Chinese epistolary literature and culture in its entirety, from the early empire to the twentieth century. The volume includes twenty-five essays dedicated to a broad spectrum of topics from postal transmission to letter calligraphy, epistolary networks to genre questions. It introduces dozens of letters, often the first translations into English, and thus makes epistolary history palpable in all its vitality and diversity: letters written by men and women from all walks of life to friends and lovers, princes and kings, scholars and monks, seniors and juniors, family members and neighbors, potential patrons, newspaper editors, and many more. With contributions by: Pablo Ariel Blitstein, R. Joe Cutter, Alexei Ditter, Ronald Egan, Imre Galambos, Natascha Gentz, Enno Giele, Natasha Heller, David R. Knechtges, Paul W. Kroll, Jie Li, Y. Edmund Lien, Bonnie S. McDougall, Amy McNair, David Pattinson, Zeb Raft, Antje Richter, Anna M. Shields, Suyoung Son, Janet Theiss, Xiaofei Tian, Lik Hang Tsui, Matthew Wells, Ellen Widmer, and Suzanne E. Wright.
In traditional China, a funeral and the accompanying death rituals represented a critical moment for the immediate family of the deceased to show their filial piety, a core value of the society. At the same time, death rituals were social occasions, and channels for the outward demonstration of belief in a religiously pluralistic society. During the Northern Song period, however, death rituals increasingly became an arena for political contention as attempts were made to transform these practices from a private matter into one subject to state control. Death Rituals and Politics in Northern Song China examines how political confrontations over the proper conduct of death rituals during Northern Song dynasty (960-1127) inaugurated a period of Confucian revivalism. Mihwa Choi interprets Northern Song court politics, family ritual practices, burial practices, and the popular imagination of the afterlife as sites of contest between groups of varying social status, political vision, and religious belief. She demonstrates that the oversight of ritual affairs by scholar-officials helped them gain the political upper hand they sought, and, more broadly, fostered a revival of Confucianism as the dominant value system of Chinese society in the period that followed.
The Politics of Mourning in Early China reevaluates the longstanding assumptions about early imperial political culture. According to most explanations, filial piety served as the linchpin of the social and political order, as all political relations were a seamless extension of the relationship between father and son—a relationship that was hierarchical, paternalistic, and personal. Offering a new perspective on the mourning practices and funerary monuments of the Han dynasty, Miranda Brown asks whether the early imperial elite did in fact imagine political participation solely along the lines of the father-son relationship or whether there were alternative visions of political association. The early imperial elite held remarkably varied and contradictory beliefs about political life, and they had multiple templates and changing scripts for political action. This book documents and explains such diversity and variation and shows that the Han dynasty practice of mourning expressed many visions of political life, visions that left lasting legacies.
This book traces changing gender relations in China from the tenth to fourteenth centuries by examining three critical categories of women: courtesans, concubines, and faithful wives. It shows how the intersection and mutual influence of these groups—and of male discourses about them—transformed ideas about family relations and the proper roles of men and women. Courtesan culture had a profound effect on Song social and family life, as entertainment skills became a defining feature of a new model of concubinage, and as entertainer-concubines increasingly became mothers of literati sons. Neo-Confucianism, the new moral learning of the Song, was significantly shaped by this entertainment culture and by the new markets—in women—that it created. Responding to a broad social consensus, Neo-Confucians called for enhanced recognition of concubine mothers in ritual and expressed increasing concern about wifely jealousy. The book also details the surprising origins of the Late Imperial cult of fidelity, showing that from inception, the drive to celebrate female loyalty was rooted in a complex amalgam of political, social, and moral agendas. By taking women—and men’s relationships with women—seriously, this book makes a case for the centrality of gender relations in the social, political, and intellectual life of the Song and Yuan dynasties.
