Chapter Six. The afterlife of a lost book—Du Ji (the record of jealous women) fifth century

Abstract

The seventh-century encyclopaedia Yiwen leiju preserves seven of the Record’s tales. In addition to the Record ’s afterlife in encyclopaedias ( leishu ), some of its tales of jealous women had been recorded as part of the fifth-century work Shishuo xinyu (A New Account of Tales in the World, hereafter A New Account ), which was compiled slightly earlier than the Record itself. Several modern historians of China in the age of political division from the third to sixth centuries have recently supposed that elite women enjoyed a higher degree of intellectual and social emancipation relative to their Han dynasty predecessors. One such attempt may have been the work listed by the scholar Huang Yuji (1629-1691) in the catalogue of his personal collection, a Du ji (Record of Jealous Women) in ten juan by one Yang Ruozeng. Keywords: Du ji ; Shishuo xinyu ; Yang Ruozeng; Yiwen leiju