University of Hawaii Press will soon publish the fascinating-looking Behaving Badly in Early and Medieval China, edited by Harry Rothschild and Leslie V. Wallace. More info here and below.

Abstract

Behaving Badly in Early and Medieval China presents a rogues’ gallery of treacherous regicides, impious monks, cutthroat underlings, ill-bred offspring, and disloyal officials. It plumbs the dark matter of the human condition, placing front and center transgressive individuals and groups traditionally demonized by Confucian annalists and largely shunned by modern scholars. The work endeavors to apprehend the actions and motivations of these men and women, whose conduct deviated from normative social, cultural, and religious expectations.

Early chapters examine how core Confucian bonds such as those between parents and children, and ruler and minister, were compromised, even severed. The living did not always reverently pay homage to the dead, children did not honor their parents with due filiality, a decorous distance was not necessarily observed between sons and stepmothers, and subjects often pursued their own interests before those of the ruler or the state. The elasticity of ritual and social norms is explored: Chapters on brazen Eastern Han (25–220) mourners and deviant calligraphers, audacious falconers, volatile Tang (618–907) Buddhist monks, and drunken Song (960–1279) literati reveal social norms treated not as universal truths but as debated questions of taste wherein political and social expedience both determined and highlighted individual roles within larger social structures and defined what was and was not aberrant.

A Confucian predilection to “valorize [the] civil and disparage the martial” and Buddhist proscriptions on killing led literati and monks alike to condemn the cruelty and chaos of war. The book scrutinizes cultural attitudes toward military action and warfare, including those surrounding the bloody and capricious world of the Zuozhuan (Chronicle of Zuo), the relentless violence of the Five Dynasties and Ten States periods (907–979), and the exploits of Tang warrior priests—a series of studies that complicates the rhetoric by situating it within the turbulent realities of the times. By the end of this volume, readers will come away with the understanding that behaving badly in early and medieval China was not about morality but perspective, politics, and power.

Table of Contents

There are maggots in my soup! : medieval accounts of unfilial children / Keith N. Knapp

Negative role models: unfilial stories in Song miscellaneous writing / Cong Ellen Zhang

Copulating with one’s stepmother or birth mother? / Paul R. Goldin

Intransigent and corrupt officials during the early Han / Anthony Barbieri-Low

Ritual without rules: Han-Dynasty mourning practice revisited / Miranda Brown and Anna-Alexandra Fodde-Regue

Bad writing: cursive calligraphy and the ethics of orthography in the eastern Han Dynasty / Vincent S. Leung

Wild youths and fallen officials: falconry and moral opprobrium in early medieval China / Leslie V. Wallace

Stopping drinking: alcohol, alcoholism, and Song literati / Edward van-Bibber Orr

Flouting, flashing and favoritism: an insouciant Buddhist monk bares his midriff before the Confucian court / N. Harry Rothschild

Running amok in early Chinese narrative / Eric Henry

“Wolves shepherding the people”: cruelty and violence in the Five dynasties / Wang Hongjie

A “villain-monk” brought down by a villein-general: a forgotten page in Tang monastic warfare and state-samgha relations / Chen Jinhua

Martial monks without borders: was Sinseong a traitor or did he open the gate to a pan-Asian Buddhist realm? / Kelly Carlton