Author: Shou Chen Publisher: University of Hawaii Press ISBN: 9780824819453 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 316
Book Description
Here rendered into English for the first time, these chapters provide important insights into the worlds of palace women and court politics, while revealing much about the lives of upper-class women in general at the close of the third century."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Keith McMahon Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1442255021 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 313
Book Description
This volume completes Keith McMahon’s acclaimed history of imperial wives and royal polygamy in China. Avoiding the stereotype of the emperor’s plural wives as mere victims or playthings, the book considers empresses and concubines as full-fledged participants in palace life, whether as mothers, wives, or go-betweens in the emperor’s relations with others in the palace. Although restrictions on women’s participation in politics increased dramatically after Empress Wu in the Tang, the author follows the strong and active women, of both high and low rank, who continued to appear. They counseled emperors, ghostwrote for them, oversaw succession when they died, and dominated them when they were weak. They influenced the emperor’s relationships with other women and enhanced their aura and that of the royal house with their acts of artistic and religious patronage. Dynastic history ended in China when the prohibition that women should not rule was defied for the final time by Dowager Cixi, the last great monarch before China’s transformation into a republic.
Author: Keith McMahon Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers ISBN: 1442222905 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 310
Book Description
Chinese rulers guaranteed male successors by taking multiple wives, sometimes in the thousands. Women Shall Not Rule is a fascinating history of the imperial wives and concubines, especially in light of the greatest challenges to polygamous harmony—rivalry between women and their attempts to engage in politics. Keith McMahon, a leading expert on the history of gender in China, draws upon decades of research to describe polygamous emperors and women rulers throughout Chinese history. Displaying rare historical breadth, his lively and fascinating study will be invaluable as a comprehensive and authoritative resource for all readers interested in the domestic life of royal palaces across the world.
Author: E. T. Dailey Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 900429466X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 216
Book Description
Queens, Consorts, Concubines offers an analysis of Gregory of Tours on issues including widowhood, marriage, sanctity, and political agency, offering a reinterpretation of elite women in Gaul (e.g. Brunhild, Fredegund, Radegund), related subjects (e.g. Merovingian marital policy), and Late Antiquity generally.
Author: Jung Chang Publisher: Random House Canada ISBN: 0307363120 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 448
Book Description
From the beloved, internationally bestselling author of Wild Swans, and co-author of the bestselling Mao: The Unknown Story, the dramatic, epic biography of the unusual woman who ruled China for 50 years, from concubine to Empress, overturning centuries of traditions and formalities to bring China into the modern world. A woman, an Empress of immense wealth who was largely a prisoner within the compound walls of her palaces, a mother, a ruthless enemy, and a brilliant strategist: Chang makes a compelling case that Cixi was one of the most formidable and enlightened rulers of any nation. Cixi led an intense and singular life. Chosen at the age of 12 to be a concubine by the Emperor Xianfeng, she gave birth to his only male heir who at four was designated Emperor when his father died in 1861. In a brilliant move, the young woman enlisted the help of the Emperor's widow and the two women orchestrated a coup that ousted the regents and made Cixi sole Regent. Untrained and untaught, the two studied history and politics together, ruling the huge nation from behind a curtain. When her boy died, Cixi designated a young nephew as Emperor, continuing her reign till her death in 1908. Chang gives us a complex, riveting portrait of Cixi through a reign as long as that of her fellow Empress, Victoria, whom she longed to meet: her ruthlessness in fighting off rivals; her curiosity to learn; her reliance on Westerners who she placed in key positions; and her sensitivity and desire to preserve the distinctiveness of China's past while overturning traditions (she, as Chang reveals--not Mao, as he claimed--banned footbinding) and exposing its culture to western ideas and technology.
Author: Marion Romberg Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 900446090X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 334
Book Description
Eight case studies focus on a specific group of European Empress consorts and Queen regnants from the 17th to the 20th century and their relationship to the media, using a unique, comparative, cross-media, and cross-period approach.
Author: Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317072871 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 306
Book Description
Queens Consort, Cultural Transfer and European Politics examines the roles that queens consort played in dynastic politics and cultural transfer between their natal and marital courts during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. This collection of essays analyses the part that these queens played in European politics, showing how hard and soft power, high politics and cultural influences, cannot be strictly separated. It shows that the root of these consorts’ power lay in their dynastic networks and the extent to which they cultivated them. The consorts studied in this book come from territories such as Austria, Braunschweig, Hanover, Poland, Portugal, Prussia and Saxony and travel to, among other places, Britain, Naples, Russia, Spain and Sweden. The various chapters address different types of cultural manifestation, among them collecting, portraiture, panegyric poetry, libraries, theatre and festivals, learning, genealogical literature and architecture. The volume significantly shifts the direction of scholarship by moving beyond a focus on individual historical women to consider ‘queens consort’ as a category, making it valuable reading for students and scholars of early modern gender and political history.
Author: Daisy Yiyou Wang Publisher: ISBN: 9780300237085 Category : ART Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
"Empresses of China's Forbidden City: 1644-1912 accompanies the exhibition of the same title organized by the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, the Freer]Sackler, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC, and the Palace Museum, Beijing, China."
Author: Man Xu Publisher: SUNY Press ISBN: 1438463219 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 374
Book Description
Challenges the accepted wisdom about women and gender roles in medieval China. In Crossing the Gate, Man Xu examines the lives of women in the Chinese province of Fujian during the Song dynasty. Tracking womens life experience across class lines, outside as well as inside the domestic realm, Xu challenges the accepted wisdom about women and gender roles in medieval China. She contextualizes women in a much broader physical space and social network, investigating the gaps between ideals and reality and examining womens own agency in gender construction. She argues that womens autonomy and mobility, conventionally attributed to Ming-Qing women of late imperial China, can be traced to the Song era. This thorough study of Song womens life experience connects women to the great political, economic, and social transitions of the time, and sheds light on the so-called Song-Yuan-Ming transition from the perspective of gender studies. By putting women at the center of analysis and by focusing on the local and the quotidian, Crossing the Gate offers a new and nuanced picture of the Song Confucian revival.
Author: Shou Chen
Author: Keith McMahon
Author: Keith McMahon
Author: E. T. Dailey
Author: Jung Chang
Author: Xizhi Shang
Author: Marion Romberg
Author: Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly
Author: Daisy Yiyou Wang
Author: Man Xu