Hilde De Weerdt

The Arts of Governance offers a global history of the creation, uses, and adaptations of the political advice literature produced at the court of or about the reign of Tang Emperor Taizong (r. 626–649). This book is the first to place the history of Sinitic mirror texts in a global and comparative historical framework. De Weerdt interprets medieval political advice literature as an administrative technology attested throughout Afro-Eurasia whose history is shown to have been cross-cultural from inception through the present. The five chapters explain key moments in the longue-durée global history of the Taizong mirror literature and do so by describing their global and comparative contexts as well as by probing the specific models of governance and the political agendas that were at play during each of these moments. The first chapter documents the use of political metaphors of the body and the mirror in Sinitic political advice literature and explains the early medieval construction of "the arts of governance" as a model through these metaphors. Subsequent chapters show how later medieval Neo-Confucian politicians developed the "learning of emperors" as a model to respond to the early fourteenth-century Mongol infatuation with the Taizong mirror literature, and ask why the Tang mirror texts, after having been long overshadowed by Neo-Confucian alternatives, were adapted in various genres and different media at early modern East Asian and West European courts and broadly circulated in print. The fifth and final chapter delves into the remarkable phenomenon of the explosion of vernacular East Asian translations of these mirror texts (over forty unique modern Chinese translations) from the late twentieth century to the present. The Arts of Governance vividly depicts the continuities and transitions in the longue-durée history of East Asian mirror literature, and challenges temporal and spatial divides such as medieval arts of governance/modern political theory and Euro-Mediterranean mirror literature/East Asian classics and commentary. It also invites readers to rethink the chronologies and modalities of vernacularization and the global exchange of administrative knowledge and technologies.

The occupation of the northern half of the Chinese territories in the 1120s brought about a transformation in political communication in the south that had lasting implications for imperial Chinese history. By the late eleventh century, the Song court no longer dominated the production of information about itself and its territories. Song literati gradually consolidated their position as producers, users, and discussants of court gazettes, official records, archival compilations, dynastic histories, military geographies, and maps. This development altered the relationship between court and literati in political communication for the remainder of the imperial period. Based on a close reading of reader responses to official records and derivatives and on a mapping of literati networks, the author further proposes that the twelfth-century geopolitical crisis resulted in a lasting literati preference for imperial restoration and unified rule.Hilde De Weerdt makes an important intervention in cultural and intellectual history by examining censorship and publicity together. In addition, she reorients the debate about the social transformation and local turn of imperial Chinese elites by treating the formation of localist strategies and empire-focused political identities as parallel rather than opposite trends.

Between the sixth and twentieth centuries, the civil service examinations created and maintained political coherence across the Chinese polity. Preparation for the examinations transformed the lives of literate elites by defining educational standards and disseminating a language that determined elite status. However, as participation in the examinations became central to that status, an intense competition to determine the educational curriculum and the subject matter of the examinations erupted between intellectual and political rivals. The principal goal of this book is to explain the restructuring of the examination field during a critical point in its history, the Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279), which witnessed the increasing domination of the examinations by the Neo-Confucian Learning of the Way movement.By analyzing textbooks, examination questions and essays, and official and private commentary, Hilde De Weerdt examines how occupational, political, and intellectual groups shaped curricular standards and examination criteria and how examination standards in turn shaped political and intellectual agendas. These questions reframe the debate about the civil service examinations and their place in the imperial order.