This volume provides the first comparative survey of the relations between the two most active book worlds in Eurasia between 1450 and 1850. Prominent scholars in book history explore different approaches to publishing, printing, and book culture. They discuss the extent of technology transfer and book distribution between the two regions and show how much book historians of East Asia and Europe can learn from one another by raising new questions, exploring remarkable similarities and differences in these regions’ production, distribution, and consumption of books. The chapters in turn show different ways of writing transnational comparative history. Whereas recent problems confronting research on European books can instruct researchers on East Asian book production, so can the privileged role of noncommercial publications in the East Asian textual record highlight for historians of the European book the singular contribution of commercial printing and market demands to the making of the European printed record. Likewise, although production growth was accompanied in both regions by a wider distribution of books, woodblock technology’s simplicity and mobility allowed for a shift in China of its production and distribution sites farther down the hierarchy of urban sites than was common in Europe. And, the different demands and consumption practices within these two regions’ expanding markets led to different genre preferences and uses as well as to the growth of distinctive female readerships. A substantial introduction pulls the work together and the volume ends with an essay that considers how these historical developments shape the present book worlds of Eurasia. “This splendid volume offers expert new insight into the ways of producing, financing, distributing, and reading printed books in early modern Europe and East Asia. This is comparative history at its best, which leaves us with a better understanding of each context and of the challenges common to book cultures across space and time.” —Ann Blair, author of Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age and professor of history, Harvard University “This engrossing account of the history of the book by leading specialists on the European and East Asian publishing worlds takes stock of what we know—and how much we still need to know—about the places that books had in the lives of our early modern forebears. Each chapter is masterful state-of-the-field coverage of its subject, and together they set a new standard for future studies of the book, East and West.” —Timothy Brook, author of The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties

Chinese Writing and the Rise of the Vernacular in East Asia is a wide-ranging study of vernacularization in East Asia - not only China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, but also societies that no longer exist, such as the Tangut and Khitan empires. Peter Kornicki takes the reader from the early centuries of the common era, when the Chinese script was the only form of writing and Chinese Buddhist, Confucian, and medical texts spread throughout East Asia, through the centuries when vernacular scripts evolved, right up to the end of the nineteenth century when nationalism created new roles for vernacular languages and vernacular scripts. Through an examination of oral approaches to Chinese texts, it shows how highly-valued Chinese texts came to be read through the prism of the vernaculars and ultimately to be translated. This long process has some parallels with vernacularization in Europe, but a crucial difference is that literary Chinese was, unlike Latin, not a spoken language. As a consequence, people who spoke different East Asian vernaculars had no means of communicating in speech, but they could communicate silently by means of written conversation in literary Chinese; a further consequence is that within each society Chinese texts assumed vernacular garb: in classes and lectures, Chinese texts were read and declaimed in the vernaculars. What happened in the nineteenth century and why are there still so many different scripts in East Asia? How and why were Chinese texts dethroned, and what replaced them? These are some of the questions addressed in Chinese Writing and the Rise of the Vernacular in East Asia.

This book discusses how Chinese religion and philosophy were represented in printed works produced in the Dutch Republic between 1595 and 1700. By focusing on books, newspapers, learned journals, and pamphlets, Trude Dijkstra sheds new light on the cultural encounter between China and western Europe in the early modern period. Form, content, and material-technical aspects of different media in Dutch and French are analysed, providing novel insights into the ways in which readers could take note of Chinese religion and philosophy. This study thereby demonstrates that there was no singular image of China and its religion and philosophy, but rather a varied array of notions on the subject.

James Raven, a leading historian of the book, offers a fresh and accessible guide to the global study of the production, dissemination and reception of written and printed texts across all societies and in all ages. Students, teachers, researchers and general readers will benefit from the book's investigation of the subject's origins, scope and future direction. Based on original research and a wide range of sources, What is the History of the Book? shows how book history crosses disciplinary boundaries and intersects with literary, historical, media, library, conservation and communications studies. Raven uses examples from around the world to explore different traditions in bibliography, palaeography and manuscript studies. He analyses book history's growing global ambition and demonstrates how the study of reading practices opens up new horizons in social history and the history of knowledge. He shows how book history is contributing to debates about intellectual and popular culture, colonialism and the communication of ideas. The first global, accessible introduction to the field of book history from ancient to modern times, What is the History of the Book? is essential reading for all those interested in one of society's most important cultural artefacts.

This proceedings book presents the first-ever cross-disciplinary analysis of 16th–20th century South, East, and Southeast Asian cartography. The central theme of the conference was the mutual influence of Western and Asian cartographic traditions, and the focus was on points of contact between Western and Asian cartographic history. Geographically, the topics were limited to South Asia, East Asia and Southeast Asia, with special attention to India, China, Japan, Korea and Indonesia. Topics addressed included Asia’s place in the world, the Dutch East India Company, toponymy, Philipp Franz von Siebold, maritime cartography, missionary mapping and cadastral mapping.

This collection of essays is the first English-language study to present the latest research on Italy’s cultural relationships with China and Japan across the centuries. It explores topics ranging from travel writing to creative arts, from translation to religious accommodation, and from Cold War politics to Chinese American cuisine. The volume draws on the expertise of an interdisciplinary group of scholars trained and working in Europe, East Asia, and North America who re-assess research foci and frames, showcase transcultural and theoretically-informed research, and help to strengthen this field of study.

An examinination of the role that Catholic missionary orders played in the dissemination of accounts of Christian martyrdom in Japan. The author offers an overarching portrayal of the writing, printing, and circulation of books of “Japano-martyrology.”