The Society for Ming Studies’ Geiss-Hsu Book Prize Selection Committee announced that it has awarded the prize for the best overall book in Ming Studies, published between 2019 and 2022, to The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World by Lynn Struve (University of Hawai’i Press, 2019), and the prize for the best first book in Ming Studies, published between 2019 and 2022, to Becoming Guanyin: Artistic Devotion of Buddhist Women in Late Imperial China by Yuhang Li (Columbia University Press, 2019).
Of Struve’s book, the Selection Committee wrote:
Over the half century, Lynn Struve has worked tirelessly to allow us to hear the voices of the men and women who experienced the cataclysmic events of the fall of the Ming and the establishment of a Manchu regime. Her translations and interpretations have revealed the traumas and joys, the disillusions and hopes, the fears for the future and profound sense of nostalgia of the generations that lived through this period. The Dreaming Mind goes further, by leading us into the minds of Ming intellectuals by way of their dreams. Drawing on a vast range of sources, The Dreaming World demonstrates that in China between the middle of the sixteenth century and the end of the seventeenth, dreams elicited more interest than ever before or after, and quite possibly more than anywhere else at any time in world history.
During a time of political collapse, environmental crisis, and social disjuncture, scholars turned inwards. Their writings about dreams reveal the ways in which they made sense of their surroundings and experiences, bothas psychological phenomena and as they were cynically or pragmatically deployed. Struve demonstrates brilliantly how dreams served as a coping mechanism in a time of profound distress. Her readings of dream-writings show not only how Ming writers drew on the historical and contemporary cultural repertoires available to them, but how profoundly their intensely personal writings about dreams shaped this period. She makes even quite well-known men look different because of their dreams. In a brief epilogue, Struve reflects on the ways in which the Ming dream world was transformed in the context of the eighteenth-century turn to positivism and text criticism. Dreaming no longer occupied the minds of intellectuals, although it continued to feature in the literary writings about and by women, not least in that most famous of dreams: the mid-eighteenth-century Dream of The Red Chamber (Honglou meng), one of most influential novels in Chinese literature.
In making this award, the Committee presents The Dreaming Mind as a model for scholars. First, in recognizing the need to research the less-rational areas of life that matter so much to people, Struve delved into neuroscience, and she succinctly explains what she learned about brains, before moving on to consider how brains become minds within societies/cultures at historical moments defined by socio-economic trends and political events. We should feel inspired by her example to learn a bit about whatever fields impinge on the questions we are pursuing. Second, in writing Struve provides enough background – carefully footnoted even for things that are common knowledge among sinologists, for instance the Donglin/Wei Zhongxian conflict – that novices and non-China scholars will be able to understand the people, the evidence, and the arguments. Third, Struve has mined and engaged with literature, personal narrative, paintings, philosophy, and political texts, with primary and secondary sources in Chinese, English, Japanese, German, and French, such that her Works Cited is forty pages long. She brings the reading of a lifetime to bear on the topic, contributing along the way to other debates in Ming history, such as the “Three Teachings are One” movement and its co-existence with tensions among Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism. Although the necessity for one clear argument is beaten into us by advisors and presses, Struve shows that digressions and complications are a worthy part of scholarship. Finally, as in her compilation of primary sources Voices from the Ming-Qing Cataclysm: China in Tigers’ Jaws, she provides lively, intensely human biographies of a number of late-Ming elite figures, demonstrating that presenting readable stories is fully compatible with meticulous scholarship. The Committee commends Struve for setting a high standard of scholarship and writing that scholars can all strive to match.
Over the course of her career, Struve has given a great deal to the field of Ming Studies. With this extraordinary book, she transforms what we know about the period by revealing its protagonists’ innermost thoughts and experiences. The Dreaming Mind provides the concrete evidence for what many of us have long suspected: that the Ming was a period like no other, not just in Chinese history but in world history.
Of Li’s book, the Selection Committee wrote:
The book begins with an ostensibly simple question: what did Chinese women during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries do to express their devotion to Guanyin? The answer takes shape over four main chapters, which build on one another: women expressed their devotion through dance, painting, embroidery, and jewelry. Reading familiar stories and paintings in new ways, bringing largely unknown or inaccessible objects and images to our attention, and combining theories of dance and performance, materiality and technology, and gender and sexuality, Li Yuhang has produced a nuanced and insightful exploration of intimate spheres of Buddhist women’s devotion.
Becoming Guanyin offers three important new insights. First, it reveals the far-reaching agency of late imperial women as artists and creators, as authors and storytellers, and as believers and religious leaders, contrary to persistent presentations of late Ming gentrywomen as bowing to male, Confucian sources of authority and celebrated only for their chastity and purity. Second, it engages with the oft-repeated descriptions of the late Ming as the period in which the population grew, the economy expanded, and goods circulated more than ever before. Becoming Guanyin reveals what this meant for women: they were able to make use of the wider circulation of texts and images through the growth of print culture and the flow into Ming territories of luxury materials, including silver, gold, and precious stones, to embody and materialize their devotion to Guanyin. Third, it reveals the importance of domestic spaces for the production of art and material culture, the circulation of knowledge, and religious techniques, experiences, and practices for both men and women during the Ming. Beyond those lessons, the delight of this book lies in its eye-popping details, its painstaking argumentation, and the complicated humanity of the families and individuals whom Li investigates through texts, tombs, images, and objects. This handsomely illustrated and engagingly written book will fascinate not only specialists of the Ming period, and late imperial China but anyone interested in religious or gender history in the early modern world.
The Society for Ming Studies received a project award from the Geiss Hsu Foundation to fund these new book prizes. The Foundation also supported both books: Columbia University Press received a subvention award to support the print publication of Becoming Guanyin, while the University of Hawai’i Press was awarded funds to make The Dreaming Mind open access.
An awards ceremony will be held at the Society for Ming Studies Annual Meeting at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference, which takes place March 14 – 17 in Seattle, Washington.
