Knowledge and Text Production in an Age of Print--China, 900-1400, co-edited with Lucille Chia. Leiden: Brill, 2011 (original) (raw)

The essays in this conference volume analyze various ways in which knowledge was transmitted, transformed, and even effaced after print became a popular tool for transmitting knowledge in China. The editors have divided the essays into four parts. In part 1, "Change," Ronald Egan discusses changing perceptions of books and learning in the Song dynasty, and Joseph McDermott describes book collecting and its goals in Jiangxi. Part 2 deals with "Quantification," and has chapters by Joseph Dennis on local gazetteers, by Shih-shan Susan Huang on early Buddhist illustrated prints from Hangzhou, and by Lucille Chia on the uses of print in early Quanzhen Daoism (and hence, refreshingly, on printing in northern China). Part 3, "Choice," contains a chapter by TJ Hinrichs on governmental medical texts, and one by Hilde De Weerdt on various possible readings of a Song historical atlas. In the fourth and last part, "Control," Charles Hartman documents a shift in three thirteenth-century political works from an annalistic documentary format (biannian) to a pedagogical, and partisan, commentary format (gangmu), and Anne McLaren investigates the vicissitudes of historical writings on the Three Kingdoms (what Hartman calls "pedagogical commentary," McLaren names "motivated history," a marvelous term that warrants wider adoption). Each of the chapters is valuable in its own right, but they acquire even greater value by their juxtaposition, as pointed out in the extremely valuable introduction by Lucille Chia and Hilde De Weerdt, which places the papers in an overall context. The book ends with an equally valuable afterword by Ann Blair, in which this historian of Europe uses the Chinese cases presented in the book to rethink Western printing, pointing largely to commonalities. As for the chronological range of this book, Chia and De Weerdt point out that the tenth century was the first golden age of Chinese printing, but that this flowering occurred only some two and a half centuries after all preconditions for print had been in place. These chapters make significant contributions in fleshing out the details of this first blossoming, even if precise quantification of the changes remains difficult. In this review, rather than rephrasing the content of the individual chapters, I would like to touch upon some general issues that emerge from them. First, many authors stress the continuing importance of manuscripts alongside print. This point, not too long ago forcefully introduced by McDermott, risks becoming a platitude. To advance the issue, one should also ask to what extent the place of manuscripts changed after print became dominant. Could a work achieve authoritative status if it remained in manuscript only? In this context, Dennis's observation that the printing of gazetteers was normative by the Southern Song, even though in terms of sheer numbers more gazetteers may have survived in manuscript than in print, is very suggestive. A second theme is the question of how to deal with the loss of works. The essays treat this matter mainly as a loss of "titles," thereby creating an unwarranted bias toward the loss of books with definite titles, while possibly neglecting