This session examines the relationship between the production of textual meaning and the material substrates that determine textuality across medieval East Asia. The four papers draw on theoretical work from the New Medievalism and the Global Middle Ages, proposing new paradigms for understanding medieval textual production and reception, while arguing for a conception of the medieval that shifts the institutional center of gravity away from Anglo-European paradigms. As an intervention into the concept of textuality, the presenters call attention to the complexities of medieval textual production, which differ fundamentally from those of the modern typeset page. To take material form and medium seriously in terms of meaning-making is to rethink and challenge the concept of textuality as it has been understood in structuralist and poststructuralist models, where “text” has effectively been treated as a metaphysical, idealized object divorced from its complex material conditions. By foregrounding the interrelationships between material form and textual meaning—with particular attention to manuscript culture—this session will propose new insights into mediality, book history, practices of reading, and theories of signification.

Maddalena Poli examines the complex history of the Shangshu (Exalted writings), a collection of textual material that was elevated to the status of a “Confucian Classic,” but was actually formed across two eras: the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), during which there were multiple losses and recoveries of its pian (“chapters”), and the Jin dynasty (265–420 CE), during which 27 pian were reconstructed from earlier fragments, creating a final version of 58 chapters. Poli’s paper traces the history of the textual sources that eventually became the Shangshu, with a focus on how excavated Warring States (475–221 BCE) bamboo manuscripts cast further light on the processes of textual formation and canonization during this period.

April Hughes turns to medieval Chinese Buddhism, querying what textual combinations, format, and size reveal about the worldviews of the donors, scribes, and readers of medieval manuscripts. These questions are particularly important for apocryphal Buddhist scriptures, which often lack information about composition and transmission. Her paper centers on the Shan’e yinguo jing (Scripture on the cause and effects of wholesome and unwholesome acts), manuscripts of which were recovered from the Dunhuang Library Cave at the start of the twentieth century. Hughes analyzes the textual content and their literary techniques, relating them to the physical aspects of the manuscripts, which take the forms of both scroll and booklet, and to the reading practices that were shaped by these formats.

Asuka Sango looks at medieval Japan, where Buddhist scholar monks competed with one another in order to attend a series of state-sponsored debates (rongi-e) and receive the resultant promotion, producing a large body of manuscripts, called shōgyō or “sacred work.” She focuses on shōgyō manuscripts produced by Tōdaiji scholar monks of medieval Japan, analyzing the content, contexts, and materiality of these manuscripts. Manuscripts were technologies of knowing and “ways of worldmaking,” as Nelson Goodman famously puts it—the very fabric used to make and remake the Buddhist tradition by ordering, reordering, adding to and subtracting from the resources of doctrinal teaching. More than a mere passive transfer of knowledge, the transmission of manuscripts was an open project allowing multiple “authors” to write and rewrite at different points in history.

Finally, Maria Kobzeva brings to the discussion to the Korean peninsula during the sixth to eighth centuries. While the use of paper as a writing medium became more and more widespread after the first century CE in China, largely replacing bamboo and wood by the fourth and fifth centuries, mokkan (“wooden slips”) were still in use in the kingdoms of Baekje and Silla. About 500 mokkan containing writing have been excavated from this region and others. The sturdiness and malleability of wood as a material as well as its wider availability facilitated the spread and adoption of Sinographic script. Differing social realities and local specifics, however, influenced the ways with which text and medium interacted, resulting in great variability in mokkan shape and content. The paper discusses the circumstances of mokkan use and production as well as its role in adaptation of Sinographic writing and communication in the medieval kingdoms of the Korean peninsula.

All four papers provide close attention to the material contexts of textual production during the medieval period while advancing readings that have significant implications for theories of textuality and interpretation. In his discussion, Christopher M. B. Nugent will then contextualize these papers in relation to current debates in studies of medieval manuscript culture and global book history.