Textual Heritage

Focusing on the afterlives of textual traditions, primarily within East Asia, Textual Heritage highlights how textual practices offer a lens for understanding questions of canonization, embodiment, and circulation. In doing so, this volume advances a theory of “humanistic heritage studies” that mediates the overlap between literary and heritage studies.

Edoardo Gerlini is Associate Professor of classical Japanese language and literature at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy. His recent publications include: “Textual Heritage Embodied: Entanglements of Tangible and Intangible in the Aoi no ue utaibon of the Hōshō School of Noh” (Studies in Japanese Literature and Culture, 2022) and “Textual Heritage and Digital Archives – The Case of the Hyakugo Archive in Kyoto” (Open Research Europe, 2023). He is also co-editor of the volume, Koten wa isan ka? (Bensei, 2021).

Andrea Giolai is Assistant Professor of Ethnography and Performing Arts of Japan at Leiden University. His ethnographic research focuses on Japanese courtly and ceremonial music (Gagaku), the reconstruction of ancient musical materials, and the relation between sound, loss, and environmental change. His research has been published in journals like Asian Anthropology (2019) and the Journal of Religion in Japan (2020), and in edited collections, including the Bloomsbury Handbook of Japanese Religions (2021), Gagaku. The Cultural Impact of Japanese Ceremonial Music (De Gruyter 2025), and The Oxford Handbook of Ecomusicology (forthcoming).

Edoardo Gerlini is Associate Professor of classical Japanese language and literature at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy. His recent publications include: “Textual Heritage Embodied: Entanglements of Tangible and Intangible in the Aoi no ue utaibon of the Hōshō School of Noh” (Studies in Japanese Literature and Culture, 2022) and “Textual Heritage and Digital Archives – The Case of the Hyakugo Archive in Kyoto” (Open Research Europe, 2023). He is also co-editor of the volume, Koten wa isan ka? (Bensei, 2021).

“This is potentially a groundbreaking publication as it is the first sustained attempt to promote the idea of ‘textual heritage’ as a separate category of heritage. It has long been felt that texts and their immense importance for cultural identities and long-term cultural memory have been left out of heritage studies as they do not belong to tangible nor intangible heritage as defined and practised by UNESCO.” • Lars Boje Mortensen, University of Southern Denmark