First published in 1981, The Renewal of Buddhism in China broke new ground in the study of Chinese Buddhism. An interdisciplinary study of a Buddhist master and reformer in late Ming China, it challenged the conventional view that Buddhism had reached its height under the Tang dynasty (618–907) and steadily declined afterward. Chün-fang Yü details how in sixteenth-century China...(展开全部)

During the Manchu conquest of China (1640s–1680s), the Qing government mandated that male subjects shave their hair following the Manchu style. It was a directive that brought the physical body front and center as the locus of authority and control. Feeling the Past in Seventeenth-Century China highlights the central role played by the body in writers’ memories of lived experie...(展开全部)

During the Manchu conquest of China (1640s–1680s), the Qing government mandated that male subjects shave their hair following the Manchu style. It was a directive that brought the physical body front and center as the locus of authority and control. Feeling the Past in Seventeenth-Century China highlights the central role played by the body in writers’ memories of lived experie...(展开全部)

The Dutch are 'the envy of some, the fear of others, and the wonder of all their neighbours'. So wrote the English ambassador to the Dutch Republic, Sir William Temple, in 1673. Maarten Prak offers a lively and innovative history of the Dutch Golden Age, charting its political, social, economic and cultural history through chapters that range from the introduction of the tulip ...(展开全部)

Althought Buddhist nuns have been a continuous presence in Chinese culture since early medieval times and the subject of numerous studies, this text is one of the first to provide a detailed view of their activities at one particular moment in time, and to be based largely on the writings of Buddhist nuns themselves.

In seventeenth-century China, as formerly disparate social spheres grew closer, the theater began to occupy an important ideological niche among traditional cultural elites. As the newly rich and the newly educated challenged the position of older elites, notions of performance and spectatorship came to animate diverse aspects of literati cultural production. The goal of Worldl...(展开全部)