Bringing Scholarship on The Early Medieval Period to a Broader Audience

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Eventually, the set included fifteen “volumes,” but sixteen physical books, as volume 5 came out as two books.2 See Arthur Wright, Buddhism in Chinese History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press) and Erik Zürcher, The Chinese Conquest of Buddhism (Leiden: Brill), both published in 1959.3 Albert E. Dien, “Yen Chih-t’ui (531-591+): A Buddho-Confucian,” in Confucian Personalities, ed. Arthur F. Wright and Denis Twitchett (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962), 44–64; Hisayuki Miyakawa, “The Confucianization of South China,” in The Confucian Persuasion, ed. Arthur F. Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1960), 21–46.4 Two notable conference volumes are State and Society in Early Medieval China, ed. Albert E. Dien (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), and Culture and Power in the Reconstitution of the Chinese Realm, 200–600, ed. Scott Pearce, Audrey Spiro, and Patricia Ebrey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001).5 One could even go back earlier, to the Nan-Pei Ch’ao Studies group, which issued a newsletter beginning in 1977. Its first issue was a directory of scholars who responded to its query in the Association of Asian Studies newsletter asking for their addresses, research interests, and publications, and thus offers a time capsule on the field at that time.6 This is true even of recent volumes, such as CHC 5.2 (2015), which has chapters by Robert Hymes, Charles Hartman, and Joseph McDermott and Shiba Yoshinobu that ranged from 116 to 139 pages in length.7 Readers who would prefer to read a survey of the period in which a single scholar attempts to bring all the strands together can turn to Mark Lewis, China Between Empires: The Northern and Southern Dynasties (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).8 Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 78.2 (2018): 477–90.9 Journal of Asian Studies 47.2 (1988): 344.10 Journal of Asian Studies 55 (1996): 146–49.11 Journal of Song-Yuan Studies 46 (2016): 225–37.12 Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 77.1 (2017): 175–83.13 To give an example, I was confused by the differences in the discussion of Chen Yinke’s analysis of the relative contribution of the Western Wei/Northern Zhou versus the Eastern Wei/Northern Qi to the Tang on pages 11–12 and 235, so checked the index for Chen Yinke. It lists pages 11–12, 13, and 76, but there is no reference to Chen Yinke on page 76, and the passage on page 235 is not listed in the index. So I did a search of the Cambridge Histories online via my university library. Searching “Yinke,” if the box “search within full text” was checked, I got only two hits, to the introduction and chapter 10. To see the passages required opening the chapter and doing a search of it. By contrast, one could easily search through the e-book and get forty references, almost all in footnotes, but also turning up a passage in the main text on p. 217.14 They also end on this note: pp. 23–24.15 On recent Chinese scholarship, one can also turn to Luo Xin, “Chinese and Inner Asian Perspectives on the History of the Northern Dynasties (386–589) in Chinese Historiography,” in Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity: Rome, China, Iran, and the Steppe, ca. 250–750, ed. Nicola Di Cosmo and Michael Maas, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 166–75.16 Pearce, when discussing Emperor Xiaowen’s move to Luoyang and new requirements that Chinese dress and language be used at court, scrupulously avoids using the terms “sinification” or “sinicization.” Other authors do occasionally use it to refer to individuals, art styles, and the like. See pp. 128, 146, 154, 278, 301, 409, 445, 456, 654, 679, 689.17 I am thinking of works like those by Barfield, Di Cosmo, Allsen, Beckwith, Elliott, and Crossley. See Thomas J. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China, 221 BC to AD 1757 (Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1989); Nicola Di Cosmo, “State Formation and Periodization in Inner Asian History,” Journal of World History 10.1 (1999): 1–40; Nicola Di Cosmo, “The Relations Between China and the Steppe: From the Xiongnu to the Türk Empire,” in Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity: Rome, China, Iran, and the Steppe, ca. 250–750, ed. Nicola Di Cosmo and Michael Maas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 35–53; Thomas T. Allsen, The Royal Hunt in Eurasian History (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Christopher I. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Mark Elliott, “Hushuo: The Northern Other and the Naming of the Han Chinese,” in Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation, and Identity of China’s Majority, ed. Thomas Mullaney, et al. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 173–90; Pamela Kyle Crossley, Hammer and Anvil: Nomad Rulers at the Forge of the Modern World (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019).18 Those looking to update their classroom assignments should also check out Early Medieval China: A Sourcebook, ed. Wendy Swartz, Robert Ford Campany, Yang Lu, and Jessey J. C. Choo (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), which is full of lively primary sources placed in historical and literary context. See, for instance, Jessey Choo’s translation of a debate on whether to move back to Luoyang after it had been recovered by Huan Wen (pp. 17–31) and David Knechtges’s translation of a poem on the joy of foods made from wheat flour such as dumplings and noodles (pp. 447–57).19 For lengthier analysis of the literature of the period, divided chronologically rather than by genre, see Chapter 2, “From the Eastern Han through the Western Jin (AD 25–317),” by David Knechtges, and Chapter 3, “From the Eastern Jin through the Early Tang (317–649),” by Xiaofei Tian, in The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature, Vol. 1, To 1375, ed. Stephen Owen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 116–285.20 Those who find these analyses of archaeological evidence intriguing can turn to Dien’s Six Dynasties Civilization (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007) to learn more.21 Those who want to learn more after reading the religion chapters can turn to the considerably fuller coverage in the two-volume set edited by John Lagerwey and Lü Pengzhi, Early Chinese Religion, Part Two: The Period of Division (220–589 AD) (Leiden: Brill, 2010), which has chapters by this set of authors as well as several others.22 On muzhiming, see Timothy Davis, Entombed Epigraphy and Commemorative Culture in Early Medieval China: A Brief History of Early Muzhiming (Leiden: Brill, 2015). Dien did write a chapter on the dynastic histories for the Oxford History of Historical Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) and has a substantial article on the historiography of Wei shu in Paul W. Kroll and David R. Knechtges, eds., Studies in Early Medieval Chinese Literature and Cultural History: In Honor of Richard B. Mather and Donald Holzman (T’ang Studies Society, 2003), 399–466.23 These include books that give significant coverage to this period, such as Valerie Hansen’s Silk Road: A New History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), Dorothy Wong and Gustave Heldt’s China and Beyond in the Mediaeval Period: Cultural Crossings and Inter-Regional Connections (Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2014), and Nicola Di Cosmo and Michael Maas’s Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity: Rome, China, Iran, and the Steppe, ca. 250–750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).24 “A Forum on Migration in Early Medieval China,” ed. and with an introduction by Wen-Yi Huang and Xiaofei Tian, in Journal of Asian Studies 80.1 (2021): 95–165.25 See, for instance, pp. 49, 179, 447, 603, 641. The longest section is in Holcombe’s chapter on the Eastern Jin, which includes three pages on “Great-Family Politics,” 106–9. He states that in the subsequent Southern Dynasties they had only “social and cultural prestige,” without explaining what that entailed. The only recent attempts to reopen these questions that I have come across are by scholars of literature: Cynthia L. Chennault, “Lofty Gates or Solitary Impoverishment? Xie Family Members of the Southern Dynasties,” T’oung Pao 85.4–5 (1999): 249–327; and Xiaofei Tian, in Beacon Fire and Shooting Star: The Literary Culture of the Liang (502–557) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007), 26–52.26 See also the special issue of the Journal of Chinese History 4.2 (2020), guest edited by Peter Bol, on digital tools for the study of Chinese history. It introduces many tools and has several research articles, including one by Tackett.27 To put this in personal terms, I remember how much work it took when I was working on the Aristocratic Families of Early Imperial China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978) to make note cards for each Boling Cui mentioned in the Northern Dynasties’ dynastic histories. I had to check the rank of each post they held, estimate when they held them, trace their kinship connections to each other, and manually sort them as I tried to ask questions about their political activity and how it changed over time. Not only would this have been much easier to do today with CBDB, but it would not have been difficult to compare them to the families with which they intermarried. The same would be true of the studies Jennifer Holmgren did of non-Han families in the 1980s, such as her “The Lu Clan of Tai Commandery and Its Contribution to the T’o-pa State of Northern Wei in the Fifth Century,” T’oung Pao 64 (1983): 272–312.28 CHC 5.1, published just a few years earlier, has thirty-two maps, many produced by using Chinese Historical GIS, so it is unlikely that the decision to include only seven maps in this volume was made by the press.29 Robert Campany has already shown what can be done in this regard. After many years in which he published almost exclusively on the early medieval period, in 2020 he published The Chinese Dreamscape: 300 BCE–800 CE (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center), covering a much longer period. It won the Association for Asian Studies’ Joseph Levenson Prize for the best book that year on pre-1900 China.Additional informationNotes on contributorsPatricia Buckley EbreyPatricia Buckley Ebrey is Professor of History Emerita at University of Washington. She is the author of many books, including Aristocratic Families of Early Imperial China: A Case Study of the Po-ling Ts'ui Family (1978), Kinship Organization in Late Imperial China: 1000–1940 (1986), Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (1993), Emperor Huizong (2014), among others.