孝子から節婦へ：元代における旌表制度と節婦評価の転換

The Ming-Qing period has been said by many scholars to be a time when literati authors wrote biographies of faithful wives (節婦) who did not remarry after their husbands’ deaths and heroic martyrs who committed suicide or were killed in order to preserve their chastity. These actions are also said to have had a close relation to the awarding of government honors for virtuous behavior－jing biao 旌表. However, according to recent studies, those biographies had already begun to proliferate during the Yuan period.Before that time, during the Tang-Song period, the great majority of those who received jing biao were filial sons (孝子); then during the Ming period, faithful wives and heroic martyrs came to occupy the overwhelming majority of the recipients. During the Yuan period, although the majority of the recipients were still filial sons, the number of faithful wives and heroic martyrs were on the increase. Also at the same time, regulations regarding jing biao were changed by the government, which decided to remove from consideration filial children who bled their thighs to provide medicine for sick parents and institute an age qualification for faithful wife candidates.Compared with the Song-Jin period, the stoppage of the civil service examination during the Yuan period reduced the number of officials entering the government and made it more difficult to obtain special privileges. Under such difficult circumstances, jing biao came to attract attention as a means to acquire such privileges; however, it became more and more difficult for filial sons to acquire the honor, as more emphasis was placed on faithful wives, resulting in a sharp increase in applications on behalf of the latter group. On the other hand, the Dynasty’s age limitations on faithful wives resulted in jing biao being limited to widows of rich and powerful families.Consequently, the increase in biographies of faithful wives and heroic martyrs during the Yuan period should be considered as reflecting the simultaneous tendency for jing biao candidates to be limited to members of the wealthy classes, who had the wherewithal to pay someone to write their biographies