From Tang to Song: Transmissions and Inventions in China’s Middle Period, Volume 2

Introduction

Anna M. Shields and Robert Hymes

Part 1: Social History

1. The Doubling of the Population between the Tang and the Song: History and Historiography

Patricia Ebrey

2. Articulations of Elite Identity During the Tang Dynasty

Anthony DeBlasi

3. From ‘Aristocracy’ to ‘Meritocracy’: A Lexicometric Analysis of Discourse Change across the Tang-Song Transition

Nicolas Tackett

4. Women’s Associations in Medieval China, Fifth to Tenth Centuries

Ping Yao

5. Changing Practices of Patronage, Late Tang to Song

Beverly Bossler

Part 2: Medical History

6. Genre and Medicine in the Tang-Song Transition: Toward a Medical Poetics

Stephen Boyanton

7. The Place of Ritual Therapeutics in Medical Governance: From Tang to Song Huizong

TJ Hinrichs

Part 3: Ritual and Religion

8. Reassessing the Baolin zhuan 寶林傳 and its Place in Tang, Five Dynasties & Ten Kingdoms, and Song Chan Buddhism

James Robson

9. Deities, the People, and Political and Social Order: Rain-Prayer Writing (Qiyu wen 祈雨文) in Tang and Song China

Cong Ellen Zhang

10. A Common Framework for Sacrifices: Li Longqian, Ox Heart Hill, and the State from the Tang to the Song

Song Chen

11. On the Term “Ritual Master” (fashi 法師) As a Source of Perplexity

Terry Kleeman

12. Interiorization in Song Daoist Ritual

Joshua Capitanio

13. Deviation from the Tang Models: The Making of the Song Divine Ancestor

Jiangnan Li

Biography

Robert Hymes is Carpentier Professor of Chinese history at Columbia University. His work has focused on the social and cultural history of middle period China, studying elite culture, family and kinship, religion, and medicine among other topics. He is currently pursuing two projects, on the East Asian origins of the Black Death and on the problem of “belief” in the middle period. His monographs Statesmen and Gentlemen (1986) and Way and Byway (2002) won the Joseph Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Studies.

Anna M. Shields is Gordon Wu ’58 Professor of Chinese Studies at Princeton University, and her work focuses on Tang, tenth century, and Song literature and literary history. Recent publications include the co-edited volume Religion and Literature in Medieval China: The Way and the Words (with Gil Raz, 2023), and “Avatars of Li Bai: Producing Tang Poets in the Northern Song Dynasty,” forthcoming in Imperial Authority and Cultures of Learning in Byzantium and Tang and Song China.