Cynthia Joanne Brokaw Books

Examining the ledgers of merit and demerit, which gained popularity in sixteenth and seventeenth-century China, Cynthia Brokaw reveals their evolution from guides for salvation to tools for social status through civil service exams. Initially rooted in Taoist and Buddhist traditions, these ledgers were adapted by Confucian thinkers, who refined self-cultivation methods and explored the complexities of fate and human action. By the late seventeenth century, their role shifted towards promoting social stability, emphasizing adherence to established social hierarchies.

This series on the history of the book in the East focuses attention on three areas of the world which for a long time have been undeservedly left on the margins of the global history of the book: the Middle East, South Asia and East Asia. The importance of these three regions of the world lies not only in the sheer antiquity of printing in East Asia, where both movable type and wood blocks were used centuries before Gutenberg's invention changed the face of book production in Europe, but also in the manuscript traditions and very different responses to printing technology in the Middle East and South Asia. This series forms an important counterbalance to the Eurocentrism of the history of the book as practised in the West. The three volumes are edited by renowned experts in the field and each includes an introduction which provides an overview of research in the field.

These essays examine the transformation of Chinese print culture over the past two centuries during which new technologies, intellectual change, and sociopolitical upheavals expanded reading audiences, spawned new genres of print, and reshaped the relationship between publishing and the state.