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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9529334" data-attributes="member: 8461">I just finished reading Prof. Anne Behnke Kinney's Exemplary Women of Ancient China, which is her new English translation of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biographies_of_Exemplary_Women" target="_blank">Lienu Zhuan</a>.As I've <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/what-are-you-reading-in-2024.701874/post-9527233" target="_blank">previously complained</a> about works of history where the <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/what-are-you-reading-in-2024.701874/post-9512676" target="_blank">author's personal voice</a> comes through, it seems only right that I praise Prof. Kinney's work for having avoided that. Indeed, this text strikes me as the absolute apex of what rigorous scholarship should be, focusing entirely on explanation and elucidation without any sort of moral commentary or personal judgment. (Of course, I suspect that this is easier to do when translating a singular text rather than overviewing a topic in general, but it still strikes me as being noteworthy.)The tradeoff for this is that this text is far from being an easy read. As an academic work on a very particular topic, this book is focused far more on accuracy and comprehensive presentation than on readability, and it shows. For instance, the introduction is roughly thirty-six pages long, presenting the background and circumstances under which the Lienu Zhuan was written, an overview of the various sections of the text, and how it was altered and amended in various editions over the years. That might not sound particularly daunting, until you realize that this section alone generates one hundred seventy-three endnotes.Indeed, the endnotes (of which there are well over a thousand) take up more than a quarter of the book, denoting everything from attributions from other texts (both ancient and contemporary) to noting where named places are in current-day China, to making notes of apparent errors in the original text, and quite a bit more. Likewise, be prepared for references to a large number of other classical works from ancient China, such as the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_and_Autumn_Annals" target="_blank">Spring and Autumn Annals</a>, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Ching" target="_blank">I Ching</a>, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%BCshi_Chunqiu" target="_blank">Lushi Chunqiu</a>, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiji" target="_blank">Shiji</a>, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuo_Zhuan" target="_blank">Zuo Zhuan</a>, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analects" target="_blank">Analects</a>, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_of_Poetry" target="_blank">Shijing</a>, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhan_Guo_Ce" target="_blank">Zhan Guo Ce</a>, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Han" target="_blank">Hanshu</a>, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuowen_Jiezi" target="_blank">Shuowen Jiezi</a>, and many others! If you're the sort of person who has to read every note and look up every unfamiliar title the way I am, you're going to spend a lot of time researching all of these.So with all of that said, what is this book actually about?From the introduction, we're told that this was compiled somewhere around 10 BCE by a scribe named Liu Xiang of the Former (i.e. Western) Han dynasty. Recent policy changes had seen the Emperor's male relatives sent to far-flung regions of imperial control in an attempt to keep them from being able to attempt a coup; a consequence of this was that the relatives of the Emperor's wives/concubines were the ones given high-ranking positions in the government. Unfortunately, this led to those women and their families being similarly tempted by power, since it turns out that women are people too. Liu Xiang had thus seen the previous two emperors fall due to the machinations of high-ranking women.The Lienu Zhuan, then, is a series of biographies of women that Liu Xiang hoped could serve as moral examples for noblewomen. Grouped into different categories, these are snapshots of women who were virtuous mothers, accomplished rhetoriticians, adhered to virtuous traditions, and otherwise served as outstanding moral paragons (though there's one section of the "depraved and favored," showing the destructive impulses of women who served as examples of what not to do).In other words, this is very much <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/what-are-you-reading-in-2024.701874/post-9297162" target="_blank">the same idea</a> that Giovanni Boccaccio would have roughly fourteen hundred years later, when he wrote a book on this same subject for Occidental women in his De Claris Mulieribus.The biographies themselves are (also like Boccaccio) more akin to snapshots of a particular instance than any sort of comprehensive overview of the lives of the women in question (though more context is provided for some of them in the endnotes), and while many of the examples include self-sacrifice (e.g. the women who stays inside a burning house and dies because she doesn't have the proper number of escorts to be seen outside at night), many of them involve a woman chastising her male peers or relatives for not acting in accordance with virtue, often transgressing proprietary boundaries to do so (and being rewarded for it). And of course, the negative examples come to bad ends, one and all.On a personal note, I was rather disappointed to see that the biography for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daji" target="_blank">Daji</a> made no mention of her being a malevolent fox spirit; fans of the recent animated movie <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiang_Ziya_(film)" target="_blank">Jiang Ziya</a>, which I believe is still on Netflix, will understand why. As it turns out, that was only to be expected, as that legend about her wasn't invented until several centuries after this text was written. Oops!</blockquote>

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