Artifacts, Actors, and Authority: New Approaches to Material Texts and Textual Culture in China and Japan (600–1400)

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

While traditional approaches to written sources focused on textual content, new methods illuminate what artifacts can tell us beyond their ostensible meaning. This panel considers the extra-textual features of material texts, aiming to spark a discussion on their utility and relevance across multiple disciplines and fields, including religious studies, literature, social history, book history, and material culture. Sharing the common thread of “authority,” the four papers of this panel address the power and influence which actors hold over a given text, and the social, cultural, and political dynamics surrounding its creation and circulation, in China and Japan between 600 and 1400. Challenging the preconception of “the sole authority of the author,” Rebecca Fu’s study illuminates the function of transcribers, often misidentified as no more than intermediaries between tongue and pen, while Bryan Lowe proposes a typology for evaluating the relationships between institutional forces and the individuals—patrons, scribes, and authors—involved in the production of a text. Brian Steininger examines the ritualized transmission of Chinese texts among Kamakura officials, where the linking of patrons to the authority of scholarly lineages shaped both book circulation and intellectual culture. Shifting away from the written word, Zifan Liu reveals the visual properties of excavated letters and envelopes as inadvertent records of senders and recipients’ influences over letter writing. By taking into consideration the material properties of texts as well as their content, these papers problematize the relationship between actors and artifacts, and the historical contexts and textual cultures in which they were embedded.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing

Session Organizer

• Rebecca Shuang Fu, Yale University

Chair

• Stephen F. Teiser, Princeton University

Individual Presentations

• Patron Function and Authorial Intent in Early Japanese Manuscript Cultures - Bryan Lowe, Vanderbilt University

• Orality and Writing: Transcriptions from Oral Statements in Medieval China - Rebecca Shuang Fu, Yale University

• Transmission Discourse in Medieval Japanese Book History - Brian Steininger, Princeton University

• Letters, Envelopes, and Tang Dynasty Epistolary Culture - Zifan Liu, Peking University

Discussant

• Matthias L. Richter, University of Colorado Boulder