Nathan Vedal

This study examines how early modern Chinese readers coped with an overabundance of texts and information following the sixteenth-century publishing boom. Drawing on a wide body of extant reference works, from encyclopedias to dictionaries, it traces the emergence of new scholarly working methods and analyzes how such texts were put to use by readers. These reference works played a central role in the formation of a new relationship between author and reader that underpinned the period’s intellectual and literary activity. By shifting its analysis from the better-documented role of such works in the early modern West, this project highlights practices of knowledge production that can be more broadly generalized to the early modern world.

The conventional narrative of the Manchus, an Inner Asian people who conquered Ming China and established the Qing dynasty, is one of linguistic and cultural erasure in the face of Chinese influence. This project builds on recent research on the significance of ethnic identity in the Qing to reveal the important role of the Manchu language in literary and scholarly circles through the nineteenth century. It makes use of a large body of neglected Manchu sources and provides a new theoretical framework for the study of multilingual empires and literatures.