To explore the historical connections between Confucianism and Chinese
society, this book examines the social and cultural processes through
which Confucian texts on family rituals were written, circulated,
interpreted, and used as guides to action. Weddings, funerals, and
ancestral rites were central features of Chinese culture; they gave
drama to transitions in people's lives and conveyed conceptions of the
hierarchy of society and the interdependency of the living and the dead.
Patricia Ebrey's social history of Confucian texts shows much about how
Chinese culture was created in a social setting, through the
participation of people at all social levels. Books, like Chu Hsi's
Family Rituals and its dozens of revisions, were important in forming
ritual behavior in China because of the general respect for literature,
the early spread of printing, and the absence of an ecclesiastic
establishment authorized to rule on the acceptability of variations in
ritual behavior. Ebrey shows how more and more of what people commonly
did was approved in the liturgies and thus brought into the realm
labeled Confucian.
Originally published in 1991.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand
technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from
the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions
preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting
them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the
Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich
scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by
Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
