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RHETORIC AND THE DISCOURSES OF POWER IN COURT CULTURE

T h o m a s J a n s e n

Review of D a v id R. Kn e c h t g e s and E u g e n e V a n c e (eds.), Rhetoric and the Discourses o f Power in Court Culture: China, Europe, and Japan. Seattle and Lon­don: University of Washington Press, 2005. xiv, 351 pp., Illustrations, Index. $ 35 (HB). ISBN 0-295-98450-3

It is a matter of surprise that the Chinese imperial court, despite its central role as the ultimate source of all earthly power for more than two millennia, has received com­paratively little scholarly attention to date. It is, to be sure, impossible to write about Chinese history, literature, religion, art or any other aspect of traditional Chinese cul­ture without constantly referring to the court or, more accurately, to several simulta­neous courts during extended periods of Chinese history. However, there are few studies that deal, in the manner of Norbert Elias’s Die hofische Gesellschaft (Court Society) or Joachim Bumke’s Hofische Kultur (Courtly Culture), squarely with the Chinese court as a social model with a specific set of values, practices, and rhetorical conventions and that seek to shed light on the social organisation, material culture, and communicative practices of even a single court in Chinese history.1 The court and its culture are usually taken as a given fact, the stage on which political events or historical developments unfold, while the set-up of this stage as well as the rules that govern the actions of its players often remain inadequately understood. Even simple questions such as which institutions or people make up the court during different pe­riods of Chinese history; who exercised power at court and in what ways; what are the main differences in terms of social organisation between, let’s say, the Tang and

1 A new book that goes a long way in this direction is Emperor Huizong and Late Northern Song China: The Politics o f Culture and the Culture o f Politics, edited by Patricia Ebrey and Maggie Bickford (Cambridge, Mass. 2006). Evelyn S. Rawski’s The Last Emperors: A Social History qfQing Imperial Institutions (Berkeley 1998) analyses the material culture, social organisation, and rituals of the Qing court. However, the book is less an attempt to understand the court as a locus of power, but to explore the Qing court in relation to issues of ethnicity, thereby demon­strating that “the assumption concerning the assimilation of the Manchus into Chinese society is mistaken” (p. 3). The most recent study of the court in Japan with extensive bibliography is Mi­kael Adolphson, Edward Kamens, and Stacie Matsumoto (eds.), Heian Japan, Centers and Pe­ripheries (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007). I also wish to call attention to the forthcoming volume edited by Anthony J.S. Spawforth The Court and Court Society in Ancient Monarchies (Cambridge 2007), which includes a contribution by Hans van Ess on “The Impe­rial Court in Han China.”

the Ming court, are difficult to answer with any depth and certainty on the basis of our current knowledge.

The volume under review is the outcome of an international collaborative research project on “Court Culture East and West in Cross-Cultural Perspective.” It addresses an important, yet understudied topic in pre-modem Chinese studies about which much is to be learned from the work of colleagues working in the field of European or Japanese studies, the two geographical regions represented in this volume apart from China. The editors/authors did not intend to undertake the impossible task of a comprehensive examination of court society. Rather, the twelve collected essays seek “to identify productive strategies for studying both the court as a locus of power and its relationship to and influence on the norms of a larger culture” (p. ix). The result is a very stimulating and, despite the editor’s modesty, wide-ranging collection of carefully researched case studies on various aspects of the relationship between rheto­ric and power in court culture.

The use of the term “rhetoric” in this volume is not confined to the art of persua­sion in the classical sense. The reader should therefore not expect a comparison of the rhetorical traditions of China and Japan with those of Europe. The essays in this book deal more broadly with the strategic use of communication and literature as a means to make the court the centre of power and culture.

The book explores the role of rhetoric in a variety of courts: Han (206 B.C. - A.D. 220), Tang (618-907), and Song dynasty (960-1279) China; medieval and Renais­sance Europe; and Heian (794-1184) and Muromachi (1336-1573) Japan. The study of rhetoric as the focal point in an investigation of discourses of power in court soci­ety does not require any particular justification. The sheer volume of official docu­ments (memorials, proclamations, petitions, etc.) that have been written as part of the court’s internal and external communication calls for a thorough analysis of what these documents can reveal to us about the power relations and communicative practices involved in their production. Likewise, much can be learned from the numerous liter­ary works and collections compiled under imperial auspices about the values and aes­thetic preferences of court society and how these related to questions of power and patronage.

The editors have organized the examination of rhetoric evenly around five themes that each highlight different aspects and make up the five sections of this volume: Rhetoric of persuasion, rhetoric of taste, rhetoric of communication, rhetoric of gen­der, and rhetoric of natural nobility. Unfortunately, not all parts contain contributions on all three cultures represented in the book. Part II (“Rhetoric of Taste”), for in­stance, includes only articles on China and Japan, while Part IV (“Rhetoric of Gen­der”) is exclusively devoted to China. Part V (“Rhetoric of Natural Nobility”), fi­nally, features two case studies from the European tradition. For the sake of symme­try it would have been nice to have one case study from each of the three cultural traditions in each section. However, since divisions between the individual parts are not very strict and all essays have a unifying subject, the reader can and indeed should make connections and comparisons across the five different subject areas. As a whole the essays work very well together despite slight asymmetries in some parts.

In “Rhetoric of Persuasion” the authors explore the role rhetoric plays in justify­ing the radical acts of seizing power, deposing an emperor and establishing a new

dynasty. Taking the case of the first Wei emperor Cao Pi W3E (187-226; r. 220- 226) as an example, David R. Knechtges presents a careful analysis of a number of documents that form part of the extensive communication between the Han emperor, Cao Pi, as well as Cao Pi’s supporters in the prelude to his accession. What is fasci­nating about these exchanges is the pervasive use of what Knechtges calls a “rhetoric of refusal,” the thrice repeated “repudiation and rejection of the very thing he [Cao Pi] clearly sought” (p. 27). By conforming to the established custom of “three refus­als” {son rang H § |) Cao Pi demonstrated his ability and willingness to curb his de­sire for the throne, a virtue he underscores by adducing a wide range of historical ex­amples involving the moral heroes of antiquity. If he ascends to the throne the transi­tion will be a peaceful one, this is the message Cao Pi sends through his pronounce­ments and behaviour.

The differences between the Chinese case and the rhetorical conventions operative in descriptions of the court of Edward II (r. 1307-1327) in England are striking, as Scott Waugh shows in his “attempt to understand the perverse political culture of the English court during these decades” (p. 37). Waugh’s study of the nearly twenty nar­ratives of Edward’s deposition and murder in 1327 reveals a complex rhetoric of vice, avarice, pride, competitiveness and emotional excess with which contemporary observers seek to explain the main driving forces behind the violent actions of the court and the courtiers. This rhetoric of competitiveness and its concomitant values, which Waugh argues were shared by observers and political participants alike, con­trasts starkly with the Chinese rhetoric of self-restraint and refusal in the documents studied by Knechtges. While the last stage in the dynastic transition between the Han and the Cao-Wei dynasty was comparatively peaceful, Edward H’s deposition was violent. Both cases lead to the conclusion that the historical events “were conducted in conformity with and contributed to this rhetorical framework.” “There is a dread­ful logic in die terrible brutality of the trials and executions that is consistent with the ideational backdrop against which they played out” (p. 38). The comparison between both cases makes it clear that courtly rhetoric effectively “structured the ways in which the political actors conceived their roles and through which political action oc­curred” (p. 59). This does, however, not mean — and neither Knechtges nor Waugh make such a claim — that English court society of the 14th century was always vio­lent or that early medieval Chinese political culture was inherendy peacefid. Court life in early medieval China was extremely competitive and often brutal. The rela­tionship between Cao Pi and his brother Cao Zhi WtS (192-232) is a good example, and the rhetoric of the “bad last ruler” who is justiy deposed by the virtuous founder of a new dynasty provided, at least theoretically, a possible alternative to the “rheto­ric of refusal” employed by Cao Pi to justify his move to power. In England, on the other hand, Edward II’s successor, Edward III, immediately adopted a more concilia­tory tone, relying on the “idioms of chivalry, courtliness, and due process” (p. 58) in an attempt to reach out to his father’s enemies. Consequently, the political actors were not constrained in the sense that there was only one rhetorical framework and set of values, which necessarily forced their actions into a certain direction, either violent or peaceful. What the two studies show is that once the political actors, for whatever reasons, had decided on a rhetorical strategy or a course of action, for that matter, its persuasive and hence legitimatory power rested not primarily on the ad­

herence to one particular set of values, but rather on the ability of the participants to create a quasi-ritual structure of events in which the textual statements and actions of participants were in conformity with and contributed to each other in a coherent and meaningful way.

Another similarity between these two very different court settings is the idea of “due process,” with which the political agents tried to justify their actions. Although the Chinese did not have a term comparable to the English “due process,” Cao Pi’s insistence on observing the prescribed sequence of exchanges of written documents reveals that the concept as such clearly existed. In both cases “due process” meant the inclusion of a broader spectrum of subjects, in England the magnates and prelates at Parliament, in China the Han administration and supporters of Cao Pi. One might muse about the question whether the appeal for support of the people was “merely a cynical maneuver to disguise the forceful deposition of the king” or “a genuine at­tempt to include as broad a spectrum of subjects as possible and thereby give them an investment in the new regime” (p. 51). (Are all modem politicians sincere in their pronouncements to prioritise the interests of their electorate?) What is, I believe, more important is die fact that both political cultures, despite all differences, re­garded adherence to certain procedural norms as essential for gaining legitimacy.

In “Rhetoric of Taste” the authors examine the role of the court in determining and promoting aesthetic values. Pauline Yu discusses the inclusion of poetic composi­tion into the prestigious jinshi examinations as a potential cause for the prolif­eration of poetry collections in the early ninth century. Focusing on the anthology Yu­lan shi IR K t# (Poems for Imperial Reading), commissioned by Tang Xianzong

(r. 806-821) and compiled by Linghu Chu (766-837) between 814-817, Yu compares the principles that governed the selection of poets and poems in the Yulan shi with those applied in other collections. Yu demonstrates what can be learned (a) about the self-image of the court and (b) the particular bureaucratic con­siderations of its scholar-official compiler, namely to promote “the kind of literary craft that had served as a primary criterion for his own appointment” (p. 83). In its selection of poets and choice of individual poems the Yulan shi differs quite markedly from contemporaneous and later collections, testifying to the court’s taste for “unruf­fled decorum” that permeated the collection. Almost all poets represented in the an­thology were active during the Dali reign period (766-779) of Tang emperor Daizong

(r. 766-780), a period during which poetry composition was being institutional­ized as part of the examination system and that produced a large corpus of so-called “capital-poetry,” poems that reflected the routines of bureaucratic life. By contrast, none of the contemporary poets active in the vibrant Yuanhe period (806-821), whose works showed a renewed commitment to political and social purpose, was repre­sented in the imperial collection. The imperial collection thus not only failed to pro­vide any “indication of the full range of what was actually being written and read in the second decade of the ninth century” (p. 85), its “anachronistic, highly static, and, indeed, hypostatized” (p. 86) character shows that by “Xianzong’s reign, literary ac­tivity was no longer centered at the capital or at court” (p. 86). The Yulan shi is therefore an example of both the court’s obliviousness of and disjunction from con­temporary literary tastes and developments away from the court.

In “Claiming the Past for the Present: Ichijo Kaneyoshi and Tales o f Ise” Steven Carter studies the life of Ichijo Kaneyoshi (1402-1481) as an example of the ways in which court families in late medieval Japan (1333-1600) engaged in aesthetic and cultural affairs in order to secure their social and economic survival against the in­creasing power of the military aristocracy. While Kaneyoshi successfully forged mar­riage relationships with powerful political and religious figures, his most important strategy to preserve his family’s status as one of the five regency families was his as­suming the role of caretaker and representative of the entire court tradition. As a re­sult, he immersed himself in all kinds of cultural activities that boasted a courtly pedigree “ranging from kickball tournaments to poetry contests” (p. 99), acting as “facilitator, sponsor, and representative of court authority” (p. 100). Here we have a case in which a courtier actively tries to identify court culture with elite culture and even Japanese culture as a whole, a process Carter aptly describes as “courtifying.”

Kaneyoshi’s aim to create “a body of knowledge that was meant to validate the courtly culture of his own day” (p. 101) becomes most conspicuous in his commen­taries to literary classics such as the Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji) or the Ise monogatari (Tales of Ise). By quoting extensively from his commentary to the latter Carter demonstrates with admirable clarity how Kaneyoshi uses philology to establish an orthodox reading of Tales o f Ise as “a document in court history and courtly po­etry and poetics” (p. 104). What is fascinating about this case is the degree to which Kaneyoshi and others who shared in this cultural enterprise successfully defined the literary classics not only as courtly history, but also as “national treasure” (waga kuni no shiho <o M !iE ). In Carter’s words, they “assisted in defining the history of the Japanese nation as the history of the Japanese court” (p. 114), the effects of which can still be felt today. Carter’s study is of particular comparative interest, because it reveals, first, a degree of identification between court culture and national culture we hardly find elsewhere - compare the Chinese cases presented in this volume - and gives, secondly, an example of a culture that preserved “the symbolic value of court culture long after that culture seemed to have lost its political hegemony” (p. 115).

Ronald Egan’s contribution “The Emperor and the Ink Plum: Tracing a Lost Connection between Literati and Huizong’s Court” presents a case quite unlike the one discussed by Pauline Yu. Questioning the validity of the traditional dichotomy between amateur, or literati artists, on the one hand, and the “professional” members of the Imperial Painting Academy on the other, Egan argues for an unacknowledged influence of literati ideals on the court of Song Huizong (r. 1101-1126).While the literati artists stressed the importance of capturing the underlying idea or spirit of a subject, the Painting Academy, according to traditional interpretation, val­ued “form-likeness” (xingsi Mi&O and application of technical skill as of paramount importance. What links this dichotomy to the political realities of the day, i.e., the factional strife between supporters and opponents of Wang Anshi’s reformmovement in the 1070s and early 1080s, is the fact that leading proponents of the literati’s evocative approach to painting were also leaders of the anti-reform party. Both Su Shi SMft (1037-1101) and Huang Tingjian f t g M (1045-1105) had been labelled enemies of the state in the partisan proscriptions of the early Huizong reign. Seen against this background, it is not surprising that the literati’s influence went un­acknowledged. Yet, it clearly existed as Egan convincingly demonstrates by citing,

among other sources, from the evaluations of paintings in the newly created Painting Academy exams. “It was precisely the new valuation of meaning or idea in painting as something distinct from technical skill with brush and coloration that accounts for the way the competitions were judged” (p. 124). Further evidence of literati influence on the Painting Academy is provided by the personal links between individual literati and the academy and even the emperor himself. It can even be discerned in the impe­rial catalogue of Huizong’s painting collection, the Xuanhe huapu EL^OJUgf, an eclectic work that “at times gives quite unstinting praise to the very literati values in art that we have come to think of as standing in opposition to court and Academy standards” (p. 133).

Egan’s article is valuable as a specialized contribution to the history of painting in the Song dynasty, for it furthers our understanding of the origins and values of artis­tic self-expression at Huizong’s court. Moreover, I believe that it is also significant for our general understanding of the relationship between rhetoric, here in the form of artistic values, and power in court society. Egan’s article cautions us to be ex­tremely careful when assuming close correspondences between developments in the realm of arts, on the one hand, and politics on the other. Such correspondences, which often appear in the form of parallel dichotomies - the opposition between “re­form movement” and “anti-reform movement” in politics equals that between “evocative approach to painting” and “form-likeness” in the realm of painting - , give us a false impression of order and consistency where the reality is usually more com­plex. For the same reason, I see no necessity in creating new dichotomies such as “aristocratic painters” vs. “professionals,” or “Huizong the painter and Huizong the connoisseur” (p. 140) to explain the existence of different styles at court. What is the explanatory value of dissecting Huizong into two personalities unless we have clear evidence that the emperor himself thought in these terms? I am not convinced that the distinction between “painter” and “connoisseur” makes things easier to understand as Egan claims (p. 141). Does it, for instance, really help us to understand the eclectic nature and function of the Xuanhe huapul Is part of the collection representative of Huizong the painter, another of Huizong the connoisseur? There is at least a possibil­ity that Huizong simply made individual choices - he was the emperor after all - without necessarily feeling obliged to justify each choice with recourse to a clearly defined role. As we have just learned from Egan, artistic developments or individual choices often cut across artificial political or social divisions, creating inconsistencies (p. 122 : “there is an inconsistent aspect to this event,” i.e., the spread of literati ide­als to the same court that denounced these literati as enemies) that cannot easily be explained away. If we still feel compelled to introduce distinctions and correlate artis­tic values to sociological categories (aristocratic painter, professional) or social roles (painter, connoisseur), we should be aware that we might produce obstacles to rather than useful tools for analysis.

The third part entitled “Rhetoric of communication” comprises three articles that examine communicative practices or language politics at different courts. In “Per­sonal Crisis and Communication in the Life of Cao Zhi,” Robert Joe Cutter studies a number of “memorials [biao ^ ] , poems, and other pieces of court communication” (p. 151) Cao Zhi wrote to his brother Cao Pi on two critical occasions during his life: his demotion, in A.D. 221, on the charge of having intimidated and menaced an im-

perial envoy dispatched to keep an eye on him; the second time in A.D. 223, when an unspecified offence forced him to write a “Memorial Presenting the Poems ‘Blam­ing Myself and ‘Responding to an Edict’” (“Shang ‘Zegong’ ‘Yingzhao’ shibiao”

In addition to “shedding light on Cao’s life these documents offer a glimpse of the role of written communications in the life of the Wei court,” Cutter justifies his undertaking (p. 151). In medieval court society, where face-to-face com­munication is an important, if not dominant mode of interaction, the question why, when, and how people communicate in writing is indeed highly significant. Although Cutter is meticulous in reconstructing the historical context of the communications, the scarcity of relevant sources sometimes creates formidable difficulties. For in­stance, Cutter cites an “Edict of the Sixth Year of Huangchu” (“Huangchu liu nian ling” supposedly authored by Cao Zhi that provides tiny bits of evi­dence regarding the crisis of A.D. 223. Yet, it remains unknown to whom this justi­ficatory edict, whose provenance is also a problem, was addressed. Hence one can only speculate about why it was written and what role it played in the crisis. Another problem is the fact that in “Huangchu liu nian ling” Cao Zhi speaks of being “un­justly slandered” (p. 154; “the calumny was weightier than Mount Tai”) by the Grand Administrator Wang Ji 3 E H , while in “Shang ‘Zegong’ ‘Yingzhao’ shibiao” he re­peatedly speaks about his “crime” or “guilt” (p. 155). How can we account for the discrepancy in two texts that refer, according to Cutter, to the same event? The me­morial and the first of the two poems are particularly interesting in this regard, for they unveil the interpretative difficulties modern readers have. Written in an “exceed­ingly courteous and deferential language” - I don’t really see self-justification in the poem, as Cutter does, rather extreme self-abasement - and rich in “historical exem- pla and diction alluding to or directly borrowing from such early canonical texts as the Shi jing (Classic of Poetry) and Shang shu (Book of Documents)” the poem cer­tainly constitutes “a unique artistic achievement” (p. 160-161). But if, as Cutter muses, “it is possible that he [Cao Zhi] deployed his considerable literary skill in part to remind Cao Pi that, though subordinate in rank and power, he was more than the emperor’s equal as a poet,” one wonders how the memorial might have achieved its alleged goal of easing the strained relationship between the two brothers and getting “Cao Zhi back into the fold, where he might hold office and be of some service to his state” (p. 161). The task is to explain how, particularly in a critical situation, a rhe­torical strategy works in which what is expressed on one level (“You, Emperor, are great and praiseworthy, while I am your most humble servant”) is at least partly un­dermined and counteracted on another level (“You may be the emperor and thus be my political superior, but I am the superior poet”). We have to remember that Cao Pi, too, was an ambitious poet who desired to immortalize himself as a ruler-poet through his literary works. The question is not so much “Why did Cao Zhi feel the need to write the poems as well as the memorial” (p. 161) than “Why did he write them the way he did?”

A common tendency among sinologists is to privilege the written over the spoken word. Conversely, Paul Edward Dutton reminds us that in the European Middle Ages the world of the courts “was a world crafted out of personal contacts and oral con­tracts in which literacy rarely held the upper hand and the spoken word was almost always more important than the written” (p. 170). Most dealings of medieval courti­

ers are hidden from our view, including all those they wanted to keep secret. In “Keeping Secrets in a Dark Age” Dutton explores this silent side of the courts where kings and their trusted advisers were always on the lookout for secretive behaviour, ironically often relying on spies and secret informants. The king could and should hide things from his subjects, but not vice-versa. Dutton provides a highly informa­tive account of a “dynamic social and political activity” that was complex, many- sided, and with shifting boundaries regarding what should be kept secret and what needed to be disclosed. While there is significant overlap between different cultures regarding secrets - conspirators plotting to depose a king always fear disclosure whether they are in China, Japan, or Europe - Dutton is certainly right in his cau­tionary remark that unless we have understood “either their secret codes or their ways of keeping secrets hidden” and penetrated “their systems of signing through ges­ture and spoken word” (p. 187) we cannot be confident that we understand the world of the court.

While all other articles in this volume focus on one culture, Robert Borgen’s “The Politics of Classical Chinese in the Early Japanese Court” cuts across geographical boundaries. The author discusses the political motivations for the use of classical Chinese at the Japanese courts of the ninth century and unravels the effects the court’s language policy had on both the development of Japanese literature and the development of distinct male and female literary worlds. Borgen’s article is important and innovative, because it looks at the creation of what Charles Holcombe has called the “East Asian kanji sphere” from a Japanese viewpoint, thus breaking away from a paradigm of literary history that judges Japanese literature in Chinese predominantly against the standard of its faithfulness to the Chinese models. The spread of die Chi­nese script and literature throughout East Asia was a dynamic multilateral process that involved China, Korea, Vietnam and Japan. Borgen’s article makes it very clear that to think of this process only or even primarily in terms of an “expansion of Chi­nese culture” or “Chinese influence” severely understates the active and creative con­tribution of the “receiving countries.”

Borgen starts off by reviewing some of the criticism the use of Chinese in Japan has elicited. Some critics focus on the cumbersomeness of the Chinese script and the burden it puts on its learners; others, like the historian George Sansom, have stressed the stifling effects of Chinese books and “second-hand Chinese ideas” (p. 201) on the minds of Japanese men, while the women, who were not taught Chinese, went on to write the most admired examples of Heian prose or poetry. By contrast, Cambridge scholar Richard Bowring has pointed to the role language politics played as an in­strument for the political oppression of women (p. 201). In his own paper Borgen “attempt[s] to put a more positive light on early Japan’s use of classical Chinese, fo­cusing on political motivations, both ideological and practical” (p. 202). Three tighdy interlocking aspects demand our attention in this regard: First, die practical necessity of the use of Chinese as the lingua franca of traditional East Asia; secondly, the po­litical value of Chinese language and literature as an element of statecraft employed to enhance the status of the emperor; thirdly, the impact the adoption of Chinese had on social mobility and the position of women at court.

Borgen describes how, from the very beginning, “Chinese literature came to Ja­pan as a result of official sponsorship” (p. 203). Especially in Japan’s exchanges with

the Tang empire - the first formal diplomatic mission to China was sent by Prince Shotoku in A.D. 600 but also in Japan’s relations with Korea “a working knowl­edge of Chinese was absolutely essential” (p. 219). The composition of Chinese po­etry was usually an integral part of diplomatic exchange, a rhetorical battlefield on which national prestige was won or lost through mastery, or the lack thereof, of the Chinese language and its prosodic rules. The connection between poetic achievement and national prestige may seem far-fetched to modem readers, but an episode Borgen quotes drastically illustrates the point. In 653, a Japanese monk went to study in Chi­na. Twelve years later, on his way home, he passed through Korea where he recited the following couplet in Chinese:

The Emperor’s home, a thousand leagues away:Here beyond the borders, wherever I gaze is autumn (p. 219)

The poem was so well crafted that, according to a Japanese source, no Korean poet was able to compose a couplet that matched it. As a consequence the Korean literati, filled with jealousy, poisoned him. The significance of the episode lies in the fact that in the diplomatic hierarchy of Tang China the Japanese were ranked as barbarians behind the Korean states Parhae and Silla, which, being more sinified, i.e., culturally advanced at the time, were recognized as major vassals by the Chinese. The Japanese monk’s “victory” in the poetry composition was therefore tantamount to a reversal of the diplomatic status hierarchy. It allowed the Japanese to imagine themselves supe­rior to the humiliated Koreans whose reaction shows that they interpreted the situa­tion in the same way.

Japanese appropriations of classical Chinese literature were not limited to the dip­lomatic arena, however. Borgen examines how imperial sponsorship of classical Chi­nese paved the way for a broader assimilation of Chinese civilization, which in turn “gave institutional form to government support of Chinese literature, since the [Con- fucian] classics included some literary works, and literature and classics were not that clearly distinguished” (p. 206).

The court was the main driving force behind the enthusiasm for Chinese culture and the centre of all cultural activities connected with it. In quick succession Emperors Saga (786-842, r. 809-823) and Junna (786-840) commissioned three imperial an­thologies of literature in Chinese: the Ryounshu (814), Bunka shureishu 3C

(818), and KeikokushG M B Iil (827). The Kaijuso (751), the earliest extant kanshi anthology, was not commissioned by the court, but likewise consisted exclusively of court poetry. In addition to sponsoring literary anthologies, early Heian emperors also supported the court university where student numbers show a predominance of the classics (400 students) over mathematics (30 students). In 728, a professorship for literature was created and, in 821, its rank was raised above that of the classics’ professor (p. 211).

Borgen emphasizes that it was the pragmatic Chinese view of literature as “a vital force in the ordering of the state” (p. 215) that resonated so well with the interest of the Japanese court community. “[Wjhen the Japanese emperor summoned his minis­ters to compose poems, they were not simply enjoying an evening’s elegant recrea­

tion. Symbolically, they were demonstrating both that they were harmoniously work­ing together to administer the land and that at the same time their land was a civilized one in the accepted Chinese sense of the term” (p. 218). To put it in other words: The early Heian court was successful in creating a self-image of being a naturalized version of the great courts of Chinese history (Zhou, Han, Tang). The re-enactment and performance of central works of the Chinese textual heritage was an essential part of that self-image.

The bloom of Chinese literature in Japan was comparatively short-lived. From the beginning of the tenth century onward, the court sponsored literature in Japanese, particularly the newly revived waka tradition of poetry. The “rise of the ‘woman’s hand’” (orma-de A ^ ) - a reference to the Japanese script in contrast to Chinese char­acters, the “male hand” (otoko-de J § ^ ) - as well as the fact that this was also the age when women writers flourished has led to a strong emphasis on gender divide in Japanese literary history. The twofold argument is (a) that since the use of Chinese was restricted among educated men, women were excluded from power and (b) that because men suffered under the burden to imitate foreign literary models, their liter­ary works do not match those of the best women writers. Although he does neither deny the literary achievements of women nor their limited access to political power, Borgen nevertheless challenges both of these propositions, arguing that “the divide between men’s and women’s literary worlds was not so great as some have sug­gested” (p. 229). Women, so his argument, were not completely barred from learn­ing Chinese, even though “Chinese was not included among feminine accomplish­ments” (p. 228). “ |T|f they were oppressed, it was not by the Chinese language” (p. 229). By the same token, Borgen argues that, when looking at poetry in Japanese, men “were deeply involved in literary activities. To be sure, some of the greatest po­ets of the Heian period were women, but more of them were men” (p. 225). With re­gards to Japanese prose writing Borgen notes: “Men did produce literature in their native language, but unfortunately they were not so good at writing prose as were the best women writers” (p. 226). Even if these remarks may not force us to rewrite whole chapters of literary history, they present a more nuanced and perhaps more re­alistic picture of the Heian literary world.

The two articles that make up part four of the volume (“Rhetoric of Gender”) con­cern, as Knechtges writes in his introduction to this volume, “the use of rhetoric to depict the representation of women at the court and reveal their role in subverting imperial power, as well as to serve as a coded expression of the political frustrations of male court officials” (p. xii).

In his fascinating reading of the Honshu iH # biography of Lady Li (Li furen ^ A A ) Stephen Owen weaves together three complex themes in which the use of rhetoric intersects with public power:2 (1) female manipulation of imperial desire, (2) the role of the historian as “the anatomist of imperial desire” and (3) imperial self­representation. Any student of Chinese who has ever thought of the Chinese dynastic histories (zhengshi lE A ) as boring should read this article to be instantly convinced of the opposite.

2 See the “The Biographies of the Imperial In-Laws” (“Waiqi zhuan” in Honshu, chap­ter 67.

On the surface Ban Gu $5 @3 (32-92) narrates the story of Han Wudi’s (r. 141-87 B.C.) consort Lady Li, a performer who had mesmerized the emperor with her beauty. Later, after having bom him a son, Lady Li fell seriously ill and was bedridden for a long time. The emperor came to observe how she was. Lady Li, however, covered herself with a blanket and refused to let the emperor see her. When Wudi begged for just “one sight,” she said: “A woman does not see her lord unless her face is prop­erly adorned; I do not dare see the Emperor as dishevelled as I am now” (p. 240). When asked by her sister why she had refused the emperor’s wish for just one sight, thereby missing a chance to charge the emperor with the well-being of her brothers, Lady Li explained (p. 240-241):

The reason why I would not see the Emperor was actually because I wanted to commit him more deeply to the care of my brothers. [...] The reason why the Em­peror pays me such regard and feels such attachment to me is because of the way I used to look. If he now were to see the min of my beauty, that my face is not as it was before, he would inevitably recoil from such ugliness and reject me. Would he then still have been willing to give future thought to my brothers and show pity on them?

By exposing the persuasive nature of Lady Li’s words the historian demonstrates how the control of imperial desire and illusions by an imperial favourite (or a courtier- minister for that matter) “can have substantial consequences in the exercise of imperi­al power” (p. 244). The emperor did indeed confer honours and official posts on her brothers after Lady Li’s death.

Owen shows Ban Gu to be an extremely self-aware and persuasive historian who “crafts his own words to control how readers will understand and respond” (p. 244). In a certain sense the craft of the historian is not entirely dissimilar from that of the imperial consort. “Both are concerned with power and the capacity of a subordinate to direct (or, put in pejorative terms, to manipulate) imperial power” (p. 245). The difference is, of course, that the historian sees it as his task to expose the dangerous seductiveness of the favorite’s “ability to provoke and sustain desire.” Owen is excel­lent in demonstrating how the historian, through his use of “subtle words” (weiyan W n ) , controls our reading of the biography and our evaluation of Lady Li.

A third theme in the biography concerns changes in imperial self-representation that took place in the century and a half that separated Han Wudi and Ban Gu. Lady Li’s biography includes a presumably authentic “poetic exposition” (Ju i^ ) written by Wudi, in which Lady Li is “transformed into the elusive goddess of the Chu ci tradition” (p. 253). In this poem Wudi assumes the role of an “adept who flies with his cavalcade around the full circuit of the universe, and then up to transcendence, af­ter snatching the jade maidens from Heaven” (p. 256). While Ban Gu depicted Wu­di’s pursuit of the goddess with helpless longing as just another example of imperial folly and besottedness, Owen demonstrates that it was a religious responsibility in Wudi’s own context and not at all in conflict with imperial dignity.

The Honshu biography of Lady Li exposed the power a consort could wield over the emperor provided that she won his affections. However, the vast majority of con­sorts and concubines in the harem were destined to endure a life of loneliness and ne­glect. In “Poetry of Palace Plaint of the Tang,” Wang Kuo-ying examines how male authors during the Tang appropriated the theme of the frustrated and despaired palace

lady in order to express their own feelings of frustration in public life, to wit their failure to gain their ruler’s recognition. Wang also analyses the potential as well as the limitations of gongyuan shi as a vehicle for expressing the palace ladies’plight.

Wang Kuo-ying notes that the authors of Tang gongyuan shi were not interested in “portraying a particular person but in expressing universal feelings about being ne­glected” (p. 269). It is due to their “universal and nonrepresentational” quality that gongyuan shi invited allegorical interpretations and thus became a vehicle for ex­pressing the poet’s own feeling of despair. A second noteworthy feature of gongyuan shi is their “monotony, their thematic narrowness and repetitiveness” (p. 278) which reinforce, in my view, the impression of frustration as a universally shared human experience, thereby contributing to the rhetorical force of the poems. For Wang Kuo- ying, however, these stylistic features mark the limitations of the gongyuan shi genre, limitations imposed by the nature of the subject of the poems (p. 278):

Trapped in the physical and social constraints of her gender and status, the palace lady is only allowed to act out a subordinate, submissive role that is entirely ori­ented toward her absent lord. Locked behind the forbidden gates and cut off from the outside world, she is isolated not only from him but from all other human con­tacts. She has little interest in the life beyond the palace walls and cares little for affairs other than her relationship to her lord. She is obsessed with her own plight and incapable of growth, not like to progress from ignorance to wisdom from ex­perience to understanding. With the palace lady as the subject, constricted in her conventional role, the poet had little room to maneuver. The palace lady’s plaint, however touching, represented but a limited aspect of a disfavoured scholar- official’s experiences.

Wang argues that because the palace lady’s real existence is defined by confinement to the iiiner palace, subordination to her lord, and a lack o f opportunity to acquire wisdom and experience, the poetic representation of her existence has to be equally impoverished. She thus assumes a perfect correspondence between historical reality and its depiction in poetry. It is not difficult to see that this assumption and line of argumentation are open to question. First, one could challenge Wang’s assumption that life in the palace was uniformly depressing, isolating, and constraining for all palace ladies in the Tang. At least it is highly unlikely that all palace ladies thought of their existence in the palace with the same degree of despair and regret. Recent scholarship on women in Chinese history has shown the historical experiences of women to be extremely diverse.3 Why should that be principally different for palace ladies in spite of the undeniable fact that they belonged to the same social group? With regard to the management of sexual relations in the Ming imperial palace, for example, Ellen Soulliere has made the observation that lesbian relationships some­times developed, and that even more often, close sexual and emotional attachments

3 For a review of recent work on women see Barbara Mittler, “Man, Woman, and Body in Early and Imperial China: Recent German Scholarship,” Nan Nu 5 (2003) 1, pp. 115-123; Paul S. Ropp, “Women in Late Imperial China: A Review of Recent English-language Scholarship,” Women’s History Review 3 (1994) 3, pp. 347-383.

existed between palace women and eunuchs.4 To put it in other words: The emotional life of palace ladies was probably richer than the gongyuan shi reveal to us.

Secondly, even if we grant that Wang’s characterization of the life of palace ladies as intellectually confined and emotionally unfulfilled is historically accurate, I see no sufficient reason why male representations of this reality should necessarily also be confined and impoverished in their potential for expression. The non-representational quality of palace plaint poetry implies the possibility that the poet is not confined by die reality that is the subject of his/her work. I would thus argue that the limitations of palace plaint poetry as a medium of poetic expression are not primarily (if at all) determined by the particular nature of its subject, but by other factors such as: the specific interests of their authors and audiences; the performative context of gong­yuan shi-, the conventions established by earlier models and so forth. In other words: The poems are monotonous, thematically narrow and repetitive because their authors wanted them to be so, not because of any restrictions imposed on them by their sub­ject. Therefore, in order to understand the peculiar nature of the poetry of palace plaint we have to learn more about the conditions of its production and use.

In the final section of the volume, “The Rhetoric of Natural Nobility,” the authors examine the ways “in which religious and philosophical ideas of earlier times in­formed the ideology of the court at particular historical moments” (p. xiii). In “Dante in God’s Court: The Paradise at the End of the Road” Eugene Vance traces Dante’s concern with redefining the notion of nobility in a number of his writings, particu­larly the Paradiso and Convivio. For Dante true nobility was no longer defined by a noble lineage, wealth or acclaim. Instead, it was achieved through the soul’s partici­pation in the divine intellect and a metaphysical love which “exalts, deifies, and en­nobles” (p. 299) humans to whom it is granted by divine condescension. Vance out­lines the origins of Dante’s concept of spiritual nobility in Dionysian theology and shows how his ideal of “transfiguring courtly poetic discourse into a program of mys­tical ascent” (pp. 298-299) relates to the monumental art of Ravenna. In the conclud­ing article, “Practicing Nobility in Fifteenth-Century Burgundian Courtly Culture: Ideology and Politics,” Arjo Vanderjagt finally discusses “the remaking of [...] per­sonal chivalry into public-spirited nobility” (p. 322) at the Burgundian court of Philip the Good (1396-1467) and Charles the Bold (1433-1477). Vanderjagt particularly fo­cuses on how Charles appropriated the terms chose publique, justice, magnanimity, or le bien publique “to maintain the stability and unity of his possessions and at the same time the power of his court” (p. 232). He also touches upon the important role that the ducal library as well as the translations of classical works undertaken by Philip’s and Charles’ courtiers played in the reformulation of Burgundian identity.

The essays in this volume cover a lot of ground, which makes it difficult to sum­marize the many themes and strategies the authors use to address the general topic of the book. The issues discussed in these essays range from the use of memorials as a form of symbolic communication, the role and functions of imperial patronage, the canonization of literature in anthologies, the social organization of the court to the vast field of writing and orality. If there is one single overriding strategy all contribu­

4 See Ellen Soulliere, “Palace Women in the Ming Dynasty: 1368-1644” (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1987), pp. 286-292.

tors adhere to, it may be described as an unfailing commitment to philological rigour combined with the conviction that a comprehensive analysis of a text in its fullest possible context provides the soundest basis for the study of court culture. The arti­cles reviewed here are of a uniformly high quality and represent the very best schol­arship on the topic available today. This volume will surely stimulate further investi­gations into the fascinating field of court culture during many years to come.