Confucianism and family rituals in imperial China : a social history of writing about rites / Patricia Buckley Ebrey.

Includes bibliographies and index.

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- PREFACE -- ABBREVIATIONS -- Chapter One. INTRODUCTION -- Chapter Two. THE EARLY CONFUCIAN DISCOURSE ON FAMILY RITES -- Chapter Three. REDESIGNING ANCESTRAL RITES FOR A NEW ELITE IN THE ELEVENTH CENTURY -- Chapter Four. COMBATING HETERODOXY AND VULGARITY IN WEDDINGS AND FUNERALS -- Chapter Five. CHU HSI'S AUTHORSHIP OF THE FAMILY RITUALS -- Chapter Six. THE ORTHODOXY OF CHU HSI'S FAMILY RITUALS -- Chapter Seven. REVISED VERSIONS OF THE FAMILY RITUALS WRITTEN DURING THE MING DYNASTY -- Chapter Eight. INTELLECTUALS' REEVALUATION OF THE FAMILY RITUALS IN THE CH'ING DYNASTY -- Chapter Nine. CONFUCIAN TEXTS AND THE PERFORMANCE OF RITUALS -- Chapter Ten. CONCLUSIONS -- Appendix. A LIST OF REVISED VERSIONS OF THE FAMILY RITUALS -- GLOSSARY -- SOURCES CITED -- INDEX.

To explore the historical connections between Confucianism and Chinese society, this book examines the social and cultural processes through which Confucian texts on family rituals were written, circulated, interpreted, and used as guides to action. Weddings, funerals, and ancestral rites were central features of Chinese culture; they gave drama to transitions in people's lives and conveyed conceptions of the hierarchy of society and the interdependency of the living and the dead. Patricia Ebrey's social history of Confucian texts shows much about how Chinese culture was created in a social setting, through the participation of people at all social levels. Books, like Chu Hsi's Family Rituals and its dozens of revisions, were important in forming ritual behavior in China because of the general respect for literature, the early spread of printing, and the absence of an ecclesiastic establishment authorized to rule on the acceptability of variations in ritual behavior. Ebrey shows how more and more of what people commonly did was approved in the liturgies and thus brought into the realm labeled Confucian. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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