Culture of Language in Ming China

The scholarly culture of Ming dynasty China (1368–1644) is often seen as prioritizing philosophy over concrete textual study. Nathan Vedal uncovers the preoccupation among Ming thinkers with specialized linguistic learning, a field typically associated with the intellectual revolution of the eighteenth century. He explores the collaboration of Confucian classicists and Buddhist monks, opera librettists and cosmological theorists, who joined forces in the pursuit of a universal theory of language.Drawing on a wide range of overlooked scholarly texts, literary commentaries, and pedagogical materials, Vedal examines how Ming scholars positioned the study of language within an interconnected nexus of learning. He argues that for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinkers, the boundaries among the worlds of classicism, literature, music, cosmology, and religion were far more fluid and porous than they became later. In the eighteenth century, Qing thinkers pared away these other fields from linguistic learning, creating a discipline focused on corroborating the linguistic features of ancient texts.Documenting a major transformation in knowledge production, this book provides a framework for rethinking global early modern intellectual developments. It offers a powerful alternative to the conventional understanding of late imperial Chinese intellectual history by focusing on the methods of scholarly practice and the boundaries by which contemporary thinkers defined their field of study.

This brilliant, important book successfully reinstates the centrality of philology to late imperial Chinese intellectual culture. By liberating philology from the narrowly defined discipline of linguistics, Vedal powerfully unfolds how the historical understanding of the study of language is pivotal in the reconsideration of the boundaries of knowledge, intellectual change from the Ming to the Qing, and ways of forming intellectual communities., Required reading on the historiography of language and writing in China. With clarity, insight, and impressive erudition, Vedal weaves together material from fields including philosophy, poetry, music, lexicography, religion, and mathematics, showing the richness and sophistication of Ming philology and its persistence through the Qing and down to the present., This important study recovers a long-ignored domain of vibrant intellectual activity that was long thought to be nonexistent or, worse, uninteresting. Vedal shows that scholars in the Ming were deeply engaged in the creative study of language and devised novel ways of understanding it. A significant contribution to Chinese intellectual history., Grand in scope and ambition, The Culture of Language in Ming China presents new and boldly interdisciplinary research. Connecting phonology to music, Chinese to Sanskrit, classical scholars to opera librettists, and Confucians to Buddhists, it will become a must-read for scholars of late imperial China and beyond., By examining Ming philology on its own terms rather than through the lens of later critics, Vedal reconstructs its richly comprehensive view of language. His inspiring exploration of linguistic study in relation to script and sound, cosmology, mental discipline, and moral message sheds new light on the learned culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century China and invites comparison with other parts of the early modern world.

Nathan Vedal is an assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto.