Abstract
Abstract Seventeenth-century Chinese compendia depicting martial arts and ritual dance belonged to the disciplines of “statecraft” and “concrete studies” popular among literati supporting the Ming-dynasty (1368–1644) government. This article explores moving bodies in two such texts held by the East Asian Library of Princeton University Library, Mao Yuanyi’s 茅元儀 (1594–1640) Treatise on Military Preparedness (Wu bei zhi 武備志, 1621) and Zhu Zaiyu’s 朱載堉 (1536–1611) Complete Work on Music (Yuelü quanshu 樂律全書, between 1596–1620). Drawing on historians of reading practices, this article argues that these books encode martial arts and dance as techniques of Ming statecraft. Explanatory text historicizes images of human bodies whose movement is evoked as pages are turned. This act of ordering depends on the technology of the foliated codex, which also allows the disruption of this order in later editions.
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