Modeling Middle Period Life Histories.doc

Modeling Middle Period Life Histories Notes for roundtable discussion Hilde De Weerdt University of Oxford 1) the first set of questions we would like to you address: Are there important features in late Song and Yuan life history writing that differ from preceding or succeeding periods? Does CBDB capture those features adequately? If not, what changes need to be made for it to do so? Can you suggest new fields, new types, or new tables? Approach I went for a small set of biographical texts of particular genres (muzhiming and xingzhuang written by and for Zhu Xi and Chen Fuliang) and scanned those closely for information that would be useful a) for prosopographical purposes; b) for social network analysis (which is where my primary interests lie). For those of you who attended the Warrick conference or read the report I delivered there, my approach here is the exact opposite of what I did there: there I analyzed the database data to gauge its immediate use for social network analysis, here I start with a small set of primary sources to comment on the database structure. Huang Gan’s obituary (xingzhuang 行狀) for Zhu Xi: In what seems to me to be a very unusual move, he outlined at the very end of his lengthy obituary (37 pages in a modern Zhonghua shuju edition) how his obituary differed from that of his contemporaries. In the process of showing us how his work diverged from current conventions of biographical writing, he has some interesting things to tell us about what may have been standard features of at least the xingzhuang type, a type of biographical writing that also went into dynastic biographies—in fact the Song shi biography for Zhu Xi very closely matches Huang Gan’s xingzhuang. What conventions did Huang Gan take issue with? Reserve Lack of dates Conversations with the emperor: brevity Quotations from memorials: brevity Huang Gan here issues some interesting caveats about core primary biographical texts: some of which (reserve) we may be familiar with