Nominal Things: Bronzes in the Making of Medieval China

How the medieval study of ancient bronzes influenced the production of knowledge and the making of things in East Asia.   This book opens in eleventh-century China, where scholars were the first in world history to systematically illustrate and document ancient artifacts. As Jeffrey Moser argues, the visual, technical, and conceptual mechanisms they developed to record these objects laid the foundations for methods of visualizing knowledge that scholars throughout early modern East Asia would use to make sense of the world around them.   Of the artifacts these scholars studied, the most celebrated were bronze ritual vessels that had been cast nearly two thousand years earlier. While working to make sense of the relationship between the bronzes’ complex shapes and their inscribed glyphs, they came to realize that the objects were “nominal things”—objects inscribed with names that identified their own categories and uses. Eleventh-century scholars knew the meaning of these glyphs from hallowed Confucian writings that had been passed down through centuries, but they found shocking disconnects between the names and the bronzes on which they were inscribed. Nominal Things traces the process by which a distinctive system of empiricism was nurtured by discrepancies between the complex materiality of the bronzes and their inscriptions. By revealing the connections between the new empiricism and older ways of knowing, the book explains how scholars refashioned the words of the Confucian classics into material reality.  

Table of Contents:
Introduction: The Conundrum of the Chalice    Making Facture Sensible    A Tale of Three Modes    On the Matter of Antiquarianism Part I. The Lexical Picture 1. Names as Implements    Nature as Convention    The Revelation of Writing 2. Picturing Names    The Complexity of Yellow    The Art of Restoration    The Hermeneutics of Picturing    Monumental Designs Part II. The Empirical Impression 3. The Style of Antiquity    Empty Seats and Wandering Ways    Trunks and Branches    Past as Present    The Fragility of Stone    The Failure of Confucius 4. Agents of Change    Erasure and Its Discontents    The Pacification of Huaixi    Recarving a Stele    The Reassuring Trace    The Indexical Hermeneutic    Bronzes as Indexical Things 5: Nominal Empiricism    Conversing with Things    The Sparrow in the Cup    How the Bell Tolls Part III. The Schematic Thing 6: Substance into Schema    Two into One    The Novelty of Antiquity    Bronzes as Schemata 7: Nominal Casting    Facture after Failure    Conclusion Acknowledgments Chinese Texts Glossary Notes Works Cited Index

About the Author :
Jeffrey Moser is assistant professor of history of art and architecture at Brown University.  

Review :
"This interdisciplinary research is persuasive, inspiring, and a rare find in sinology. It should be of interest to those who study text-image relationships, the theory of things, the Tang-Song transition, and catalog making in premodern China." “Nominal Things is a groundbreaking philosophical study of medieval Chinese ritual vessels. It makes clear why such objects were of central cultural importance at the time and why their history should be anything but marginalized in contemporary literary and visual theory. Questioning the value of Western art historical concepts such as representation, Moser devises a new theoretical framework that follows the medieval Confucian discourse on illustrated lexicographic texts and the interpretation of classical bronzes.” “This is an elegantly argued, well-written, and quite brilliant book. Moser marshals the full panoply of advanced critical methods in the contemporary humanities while engaging with a significant phenomenon in Chinese history: the revival of interest in antiquity during the Song period. Nominal Things is unquestionably a remarkable achievement.”