Textual Transmission of Earlier Literature during the Yuan, Ming, and Qing Dynasties

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wai-Yee Li
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Textual Transmission ◽  
Ming And Qing Dynasties ◽  
Political Legitimation

Classical Chinese literature exerts a powerful hold on readers and writers in later periods. The question of how earlier literature was preserved, classified, anthologized, and distributed is vital for understanding how authors defined their creative and interpretive endeavors during the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. Printing expanded, with a dramatic increase in numbers and variety in the sixteenth century. For many of the texts discussed in our volume, the earliest extant editions or reconstituted versions date from the Ming dynasty, and many important commentaries and annotations were produced during the late imperial period. Encyclopedias and collectanea show how tradition is repackaged. Political legitimation is bound up with state-sponsored comprehensive collections and encyclopedias. Anthologies of earlier literature and commentaries on them yield insights into literary trends in later periods. Primers and textbooks demonstrate the role of classical literature in acquiring basic linguistic and literary competence.

Honouring the Prophet's Family: A Comparison of the Approaches to Political Legitimacy of Abū’lḤasan ʿAlī al-Marīnī and Aḥmad al-Manṣūr al-Saʿdī

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Cory
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Relative Power ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
Political Legitimation

Although the fourteenth century Marīnids openly acknowledged their Berber identity, by the end of the sixteenth century, sharīfian descent had become a requirement for Moroccan rule. This chapter examines the political propaganda of the Marīnid sultan Abū’l-Ḥasan ʿAlī (r. 731–752/1331–1351) and the Saʿdī sultan Aḥmad al-Manṣūr al-Dhahabī (r. 986–1012/1578–1603). It considers similarities and differences between their political propaganda in light of their differing historical circumstances, particularly the relative power of sharīfian movements during their respective reigns, as well as the importance of holy lineages, monarchical treatment of the shurafāʾ, and the role of ceremonies in political legitimation. It argues that the Saʿdī ability to convince Moroccans of their sharīfian lineage connected with a larger trend to equate political power with descent from the Prophet and reinforced their authority. In contrast, the Marīnids contributed to their own downfall through their inconsistent policies towards honouring the shurafāʾ.

Epilogue

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellie R. Schainker
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
East European ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Cultural Mobility ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Revolutionary Period

The epilogue summarizes how the phenomenon of Russian Jewish conversion, though marginal in number, left an outsized imprint on the cultural map of East European Jews who grappled with questions of Jewish identity and the role of religion in the increasingly powerful Jewish secular nationalist ideologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The epilogue explores evolving Jewish attitudes towards baptism, interfaith sociability, and cultural mobility in the late-imperial period, and it puts conversions from Judaism in imperial Russia in conversation with conversions from Judaism in the modern period more broadly. Finally, the epilogue looks ahead to the inter-revolutionary period (1906-1917) and the Soviet period when conversions from Judaism accelerated, accompanied by a growing ethnic conception of Jewish identity whereby national Jewishness found explicit harmony with Christian religious adherence.

Globalisation Interrupted? The Case of Opium in the Circulation of Medical Knowledge in Ming Dynasty China

2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 524-548 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Antonio Cantón Álvarez
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Medical Practice ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Yuan Dynasty ◽  
Medical Practices ◽  
Medical Tradition ◽  
The Yuan Dynasty ◽  
Western Drug

The spread of Western medical practices to China, initiated during the Mongol dynasty, is often considered an example of “medical globalisation,” but few studies have looked at the actual level of adoption of Western medicine in the period after the Yuan dynasty. This essay analyses eighteen Ming dynasty medical sources in order to assess the role of opium, a Western drug, in post-Yuan medical practice. This essay concludes that opium was not widely used in the first centuries of the Ming dynasty, and, when finally adopted in the sixteenth century, its use was disconnected from the Yuan dynasty medical tradition. These findings make us question the continuity and even the existence of the “Mongol medical globalisation,” as well as the validity of the use of synchronic methodology for the study of centuries-long processes such as globalisation.

The Rules of Prose in Sixteenth-Century China: Tang Shunzhi (1507-1560) as an Anthologist

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-182
Author(s):  
Timothy Robert Clifford
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
The Other ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Ancient Literature ◽  
Endless Variety

AbstractThis paper examines the role of the anthologist in late imperial Chinese print culture. Specifically, it focuses on the sixteenth-century anthologist Tang Shunzhi. Tang’s first place finish in the 1529 metropolitan examinations came at a pivotal moment. As commercial anthology printers responded to an expanding reading public by applying readers’ aids such as punctuation and commentary to increasingly diverse textual corpora, Tang’s distinctive method of annotation was used to ‘reveal’ the rules of Ming examination prose operating universally across a seemingly endless variety of texts. At the same time, Tang’s own belief in universal rules of prose was the product of an educational movement to supplement the narrow and monotonous examination curriculum by providing students with anthologies of ancient literature. These two Tangs—one revealing uniformity within diversity, the other revealing diversity within uniformity—highlight contradictory trends toward both stereotypy and diversification within sixteenth-century print culture more broadly.

A Deep History of Chinese Shareholding

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 325-351
Author(s):  
Madeleine Zelin
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Public Investment ◽  
Company Law ◽  
Legal Transplant ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
Industrial Projects ◽  
The Rich

By the turn of the twentieth century the absence of codified law governing private economic transactions was a key target of foreign and Chinese critiques of the imperial legal system. Expectations ran high that China's first legal transplant, the 1904 Company Law, would lead to unprecedented public investment in large-scale industrial projects. Their disappointment, and the continued dominance of small business in the Chinese marketplace, has been attributed to factors ranging from Chinese cultural aversion to impersonal investment to shortcomings in the law itself. This study shifts our attention to the indigenous practices that company law was meant to supplant, examining the diverse sources of Chinese shareholding practices and the rich menu of options they provided investors. Most importantly, it argues that by the late imperial period shares were well-established as abstract income producing assets that could be bought and sold, creating the possibility of partnership relationships that could be both impersonal and long-lived despite the absence in China of a formal company law. That this tradition did not lead to the emergence of an analogue to the corporation in the West raises new questions about the demand for such entities and the role of transplantation in suppressing indigenous solutions to business problems.

Of Reformed Versifying

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Rhodes
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Native Form ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
English Verse ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Mean ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Stylistic Ideal

This chapter examines how the development of English poetry in the second half of the sixteenth century is characterized by the search for an appropriate style. In this context, ‘reformed versifying’ may be understood as a reconciliation of high and low in which the common is reconfigured as a stylistic ideal of the mean. That development can be traced in debates about prosody where an alternative sense of ‘reformed versifying’ as adapting classical metres to English verse is rejected in favour of native form. At the same time Sidney recuperates poetry by reforming it as an agent of virtue. Reformation and Renaissance finally come together in Spenser, who realizes Erasmus’ aim of harmonizing the values of classical literature with Christian doctrine, and reconciles the foreign and the ‘homewrought’. The Faerie Queene of 1590 represents the triumph of the mean in both style and, through its celebration of marriage, in substance.

Viktor Vasnetsov’s New Icons

Experiment ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-144
Author(s):  
Wendy Salmond
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Paris Exposition ◽  
The Many ◽  
Modern Orthodox ◽  
Human Hands

Abstract This essay examines Russian artist Viktor Vasnetsov’s search for a new kind of prayer icon in the closing decades of the nineteenth century: a hybrid of icon and painting that would reconcile Russia’s historic contradictions and launch a renaissance of national culture and faith. Beginning with his icons for the Spas nerukotvornyi [Savior Not Made by Human Hands] Church at Abramtsevo in 1880-81, for two decades Vasnetsov was hailed as an innovator, the four icons he sent to the Paris “Exposition Universelle” of 1900 marking the culmination of his vision. After 1900, his religious painting polarized elite Russian society and was bitterly attacked in advanced art circles. Yet Vasnetsov’s new icons were increasingly linked with popular culture and the many copies made of them in the late Imperial period suggest that his hybrid image spoke to a generation seeking a resolution to the dilemma of how modern Orthodox worshippers should pray.

scholarly journals ERASMUS AND JUAN LUIS VIVES ON RHETORICAL DECORUM AND POLITICS

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
KAARLO HAVU
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political Rhetoric ◽  
Rhetorical Theory ◽  
History Of Rhetoric ◽  
Rhetorical Situation ◽  
Internal Development ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of

Abstract The article analyses the emergence of decorum (appropriateness) as a central concept of rhetorical theory in the early sixteenth-century writings of Erasmus and Juan Luis Vives. In rhetorical theory, decorum shifted the emphasis from formulaic rules to their creative application in concrete cases. In doing so, it emphasized a close analysis of the rhetorical situation (above all the preferences of the audience) and underscored the persuasive possibilities of civil conversation as opposed to passionate, adversarial rhetoric. The article argues that the stress put on decorum in early sixteenth-century theory is not just an internal development in the history of rhetoric but linked to far wider questions concerning the role of rhetoric in religious and secular lives. Decorum appears as a solution both to the divisiveness of language in the context of the Reformation and dynastic warfare of the early sixteenth century and as an adaptation of the republican tradition of political rhetoric to a changed, monarchical context. Erasmus and Vives maintained that decorum not only suppressed destructive passions and discord, but that it was only through polite and civil rhetoric (or conversation) that a truly effective persuasion was possible in a vast array of contexts.

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