Localizing Learning: The Literati Enterprise in Wuzhou, 1100–1600(Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series)

As the first intellectual history of Song, Yuan, and Ming China written from a local perspective, Localizing Learning shows how literati learning in Wuzhou came to encompass examination studies, Neo-Confucian moral philosophy, historical and Classical scholarship, encyclopedic learnedness, and literary writing, and traces how debates over the relative value of moral cultivation, cultural accomplishment, and political service unfolded locally. The book is set in one locality, Wuzhou (later Jinhua), a prefecture in China’s Zhejiang province, from the twelfth through the sixteenth century. Its main actors are literati of the Song, Yuan, and Ming, who created a local tradition of learning as a means of cementing their common identity and their claim to moral, political, and cultural leadership. Close readings of philosophical and literary texts with quantitative analysis of social and kinship networks consider why and how the local literati enterprise was built. By treating learning as the subject, it broadens our perspective, going beyond a history of ideas to investigate the social practices and networks of kinship and collegiality with which literati defined themselves in local, regional, and national contexts.

About the Author :
Peter K. Bol is Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University.

Review :
Magisterial…No overview can possibly do justice to the richness of the documentation, or the complexity of the analysis found in this book…a very fine work of scholarship, that will provide readers interested in this period of Chinese history with a remarkable wealth of information to understand the intersection of local and national interests in education. What is learning? How might it be ‘localized’? What would ‘localizing learning’ do to local society? Peter Bol goes a long way towards answering these questions…An important book. [A] must-read for scholars of premodern China…With its power to inspire and invigorate, Localizing Learning will be a field-shaping influence on the study of premodern Chinese thought and society in the decades to come. The book anticipates the future by amplifying the many exciting possibilities emerging from the present.