Clara Wing-chung Ho - Böcker

Each chapter of this collection addresses a problem in Chinese history that is both interesting and important, as well as offering new ideas and interpretations, plus a methodological example that might inspire other scholars. There is a wide temporal span among the chapters, which take in early, medieval, and late imperial China. There is also a broad range of topics covered, including gender, society, archaeology, historiography, demography, intellectual thought, art, science, and technology. One chapter introduces the use of a kind of data completely new to the field of Chinese studies and develops the combination of old and new methods required to make sense of them, and the findings offer new challenges to economic, social, and medical historians. Another chapter invites us to rethink the reasons why "the woman question" emerged so suddenly, and to ask how conditions changed after 1898 to so radically alter views of women's place. Yet another reconsiders the rapid industrialization of Europe in the nineteenth century in light of the slower but equally extraordinary rise of modern Chinese machine-driven industry after 1860. The collective nature of this volume and the variety of its approaches and topics, plus the high quality of each chapter, make it accessible to scholars in a wide range of intellectual fields who may use from one to all chapters.

This new volume of the Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women spans more than 2,000 years from antiquity to the early seventh century. It recovers the stories of more than 200 women, nearly all of them unknown in the West. The contributors have sifted carefully through the available sources, from the oracle bones to the earliest legends, from Liu Xiang's didactic Biographies to official and unofficial histories, for glimpses and insights into the lives of women.

This is the first volume to present a comprehensive collection of sources on Chinese women's history. The anthology explores overt and covert information on Chinese women across a vast number of textual and non-textual materials, as well as conventional and unconventional sources. Some chapters revisit well known texts or previously marginalized texts and brainstorm new ways to use and interpret these sources; other chapters explore new or previously overlooked or undervalued materials. The collection is an invaluable work completed by a committed group of more than twenty scholars, writing from different locations across the world.