Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity: Gender and Social Change in China, 1000–1400 by Beverly Bossler (review)

The year 2013 was an exciting one for Song historians in America. Among their fruitful output, Beverly Bossler’s monograph—Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity—exemplifies the author’s substantial knowledge of primary sources, extraordinary talent in unraveling complicated facts, sensitivity to unrevealed social dynamics, and distinct transdynastic vision. In 1998, Bossler impressed us with her careful analysis of kinship relationships in Powerful Relations: Kinship, Status, and the State in Sung China (960–1279) and contributed to the prevailing discussion on localism in the Song. The book also shed light on the significance of women in family networks. It inspired her further interest in gender history, which engendered the publication of considerable women-centered articles in the ensuing fifteen years. In addition to wives in regular family complexes, she has devoted much time and effort to reconstruct the lives of marginalized heroines—prostitutes and concubines—who were theoretically excluded from the balanced husband-wife cosmos but participated in the definition of domesticity. Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity concludes Bossler’s decade-long research project, presenting a complicated picture of changes and continuities in Chinese society from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries from a gender perspective.

In conformity with the title, Bossler’s book is “structured by time period and topic” in order to reveal the gradual transformation of three types of women—courtesans, concubines and principal wives—in the Song and Yuan dynasties. It highlights the influence of “political disruptions” on “gender norms” (p. 8), and thus frames these women’s experience in three periods—Northern Song (960–1127), Southern Song (1127–1279), and Yuan (1279–1368).

Bossler is a Song historian who knows Tang literature as well. The first part of Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity relies heavily on her rich knowledge of the Tang. The creation of the “Court Entertainment Bureau,” a system of government courtesans, as well as the development of urban centers and merchant class, all fueled the prosperity of courtesans: “The ubiquity of female entertainers in Song social life was very much a legacy of Tang and Five Dynasties practices” (p. 15). Focusing on the Northern Song, Bossler shows how the development of courtesan-related institutions and the practices and views of courtesans, concubines, and exemplary women departed from those of Tang predecessors. Government and private courtesans appealed to customers of varied social and economic status. A booming economic market in women substantiated the prosperity of entertainment culture. At the same time, unprecedented social mobility bolstered widespread social anxiety, transformed “family structures and dynamics” (p. 128), and resulted in contradictory attitudes toward concubines in elite households. The “social concerns about courtesans and concubines” were intertwined with a “new interest in female fidelity” (p. 158), and women of various identities appeared as exemplary paragons in men’s writings.

The social chaos in the Northern Song-Southern Song transition did not end the proliferation of female entertainers. The boundary between government-courtesans and private ones was further blurred. Their ubiquitous presence in cities and countryside was well-documented, arousing unfavorable moral concern and occasionally humane sympathy. The commodification of women became increasingly prominent. The fashion of pursuing concubines spread to the non-office-holding class and caused new social and family problems. In response, elite men made efforts to “domesticate” concubines and eulogize their motherly virtue. In men’s writing, the transformation of concubines from entertainers to ancestors was accompanied by the flourishing of narratives on exemplary women, among whom upper-class wives demonstrated “an unprecedented appearance.” Female martyrs and faithful widows were celebrated “as models for male political loyalty and the preservation of Confucian culture” (p. 289).

The Song empire was conquered by the Mongols in the late thirteenth century. The Yuan has not yielded much scholarship in English because of its non...