The book multiple : Treatise on Military Preparedness (1621) and encyclopedic practice in seventeenth-century China

In 1621, with Jurchen armies threatening Ming China’s (1368–1644) northeastern border, Mao Yuanyi 茅元儀 (1594–1640) finished a compendium titled Wu bei zhi 武備志 (Treatise on military preparedness). In response to rapidly changing social, intellectual, economic, and political circumstances in early-seventeenth-century Chinese society, elites produced increasing numbers of technical compendia on statecraft and concrete studies. Scholars have argued that encyclopedias in seventeenth-century China reflected epistemic changes analogous to the new emphasis on empiricism and information collection in early modern Europe, but have not explained the intellectual and social practices that produced these tomes, their compilers’ epistemic assumptions that shaped these practices, and contemporary notions of technical expertise. Using Wu bei zhi as a case study, this dissertation asks what practices specific to the late Ming dynasty produced books like Wu bei zhi and enacted the figure of the expert compiler. It explores what assumptions about knowledge and expertise underwrote these practices, and how the practices and objects they enacted changed over time. Drawing on the ontological and practice turns in critical theory, especially the work of Annemarie Mol, and on methods in the history of the book, especially reader response criticism, I argue that Wu bei zhi is a multiple yet coherent epistemic and material object produced through changing social and intellectual practices. Chapter 2 describes the citation and information organization practices used in Wu bei zhi; Chapter 3 examines the social practices in Mao Yuanyi’s correspondence; Chapter 4 examines the printed punctuation in Wu bei zhi; Chapter 5 compares these practices to those observable in other contemporary statecraft compendia; and Chapter 6 examines the responses of later readers to Wu bei zhi and material evidence of reading practices in surviving late-Qing dynasty (1644–1911) copies of the text. Ultimately, I argue that late-Ming practices of citation, information organization, punctuation, and interpersonal communication enacted a notion of expertise dependent on mastery of textual knowledge and the ability to extrapolate that to its application in practice. Mao Yuanyi and his book mutually constructed one another as objects, though the underlying understanding of expertise changed over time.Arts, Faculty ofHistory, Department ofGraduat