The Culture of Language in Ming China

Ya Zuo, author of Shen Gua’s Empiricism:
Grand in scope and ambition, The Culture of Language in Ming China presents new and boldly interdisciplinary research. Connecting phonology to music, Chinese to Sanskrit, classical scholars to opera librettists, and Confucians to Buddhists, it will become a must-read for scholars of late imperial China and beyond.

Bruce Rusk, cotranslator of The Book of Swindles Selections from a Late Ming Collection:
This important study recovers a long-ignored domain of vibrant intellectual activity that was long thought to be nonexistent or, worse, uninteresting. Vedal shows that scholars in the Ming were deeply engaged in the creative study of language and devised novel ways of understanding it. A significant contribution to Chinese intellectual history.

David Lurie, author of Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing:
Required reading on the historiography of language and writing in China. With clarity, insight, and impressive erudition, Vedal weaves together material from fields including philosophy, poetry, music, lexicography, religion, and mathematics, showing the richness and sophistication of Ming philology and its persistence through the Qing and down to the present.

Suyoung Son, author of Writing for Print: Publishing and the Making of Textual Authority in Late Imperial China:
This brilliant, important book successfully reinstates the centrality of philology to late imperial Chinese intellectual culture. By liberating philology from the narrowly defined discipline of linguistics, Vedal powerfully unfolds how the historical understanding of the study of language is pivotal in the reconsideration of the boundaries of knowledge, intellectual change from the Ming to the Qing, and ways of forming intellectual communities.