Behaving Badly in Early and Medieval China ed. by N. Harry Rothschild and Leslie V. Wallace (review)

This volume assembles thirteen essays on topics from the Spring and Autumn period down to the Northern Song, drawing on primary sources ranging from standard historiographical and philosophical classics to excavated texts, bellettristic works in various genres, anomaly accounts, and Buddhist scriptural and hagiographical traditions. As the title indicates, the unifying thread through what is in many regards a quite disparate set of essays is a shared focus on one variety or another of violation of standards of moral or proper behavior. Both in terms of the range of periods and topics and of the analytical frameworks adopted, the authors have taken their mandate to reflect on “bad behavior” in early and medieval Chinese sources in markedly divergent directions, but on the aggregate the volume provides an engaging introduction both to some relatively understudied issues as well as new perspectives on some canonical works and methodological problems.

The essays are grouped into three sections—though as is natural, there are recurrent themes and issues that bridge across these sections. A first group centers on canonical traditionalist ethical categories: obligations of child to parent (including stepparent or parent-in-law) and obligations of minister to ruler. The first two essays, by Keith Knapp and Cong Ellen Zhang, explore narrative traditions relating to cases of shocking unfiliality toward parents or parents-in-law; Knapp’s essay focuses on the early medieval and Tang eras, while Zhang’s examines the burgeoning world of popular narratives on similar themes from the Song. Paul Goldin contributes an essay on traditional accounts of incest between sons and stepmothers or birth mothers, situating such narratives in the early Chinese ethnographic imaginary as it related to steppe peoples and their cultures. The section concludes with an essay by Anthony Barbieri-Low combing excavated sources from the Shuihudi 睡虎地 cache and a sampling of other entombed texts for the light they can shed on the thorny administrative and rhetorical difficulties encountered in promulgating ideals of official probity and public-spiritedness during the early years of the Western Han empire.

In the volume’s second section, second-order reflections on the definition and application of criteria for moral judgment predominate over first-order documentation of violations. The essay by Miranda Brown and Alexandra Fodde-Reguer on discussions of mourning ritual in Ying Shao’s 應劭 (ca. 153– 196)¹ Fengsu tongyi 風俗通義 would in some ways fit equally well alongside the discussions of filial piety in the first section, but the focus in this essay is not on accounts of unfilial behavior per se but on thinking through the seemingly paradoxical ways in which Ying Shao articulates his criteria for proper ritual behavior. The remaining essays in this section treat instances where the categories in which bad behavior is critiqued seem themselves potentially open to interpretation or alternative evaluation. Vincent Leung’s essay focuses on the Eastern Han writer Zhao Yi 趙壹 (ca. 130–185) and his argument that the burgeoning trend among his contemporaries toward fetishizing and imitating masters of cursive writing was at best a pointless distraction and at worst morally pernicious. Leslie Wallace provides a survey of the often ambivalent attitudes reflected in Han to early medieval writings on falconry. Edwin Van Bibber-Orr assembles Northern Song anecdotes and poems on the downsides of what often seems to be the natural second occupation of Chinese literati— drinking—in an effort to bring these sources into dialogue with the modern-day clinical language of substance abuse. The final essay in this section, by N. Harry Rothschild, unpacks the elusive but politically explosive import of a moment of calculated indecorum in an anecdote about the late seventh-century Buddhist monk Xue Huaiyi 薛懷義 (?–695), whose decoding involves reading through and across the sometimes incommensurable values and standards of Buddhist communities, imperial favorites, and court officials as well as the gender and sexual politics in play around the court of Huaiyi’s patron Wu...