The Women Who Ruled China: Buddhism, Multiculturalism, and Governance in the Sixth Century by Stephanie Balkwill (review)

The Women Who Ruled China: Buddhism, Multiculturalism, and Governance in the Sixth Century. By Stephanie Balkwill. University of California Press. Pp. xx + 262. $34.95 (paper); open access.

The Women Who Ruled China: Buddhism, Multiculturalism, and Governance in the Sixth Century. By Stephanie Balkwill. University of California Press, 2024. ISBN: 978-0520401815. 272 pp

In the late fifth century, a girl whose name has been forgotten by history was born at the edge of the Chinese empire. By the time of her death, she had transformed herself into Empress Dowager Ling, one of the most powerful politicians of her age and one of the first of many Buddhist women to wield incredible influence in dynastic East Asia. In this book, Stephanie Balkwill documents the Empress Dowager’s rise to power and life on the throne against the broader world of imperial China under the rule of the Northern Wei dynasty, a foreign people from Inner Asia who built their capital deep in the Chinese heartland. Building on largely untapped Buddhist materials, Balkwill shows that the life and rule of the Empress Dowager is a larger story of the reinvention of religious, ethnic, and gender norms in a rapidly changing multicultural society. The Women Who Ruled China recovers the voices of those left out of the mainstream historical record, painting a compelling portrait of medieval Chinese society reinventing itself under the Empress Dowager’s leadership.

Reviews 239 Ellis, Katharine. The Politics of Plainchant in fin-de-siècle France. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. ISBN 978-1-4094-6373-3. Pp. 137. $79.95. After the French Revolution, Napoleon legalized the Catholic Church, although he disestablished it. He recognized the economic advantages of having unpaid nuns do much of the nursing and elementary school teaching in France. After the Concordat (1801), religious vocations in France steadily increased throughout the nineteenth century,to one French person in every hundred.After the Third Republic finally became politically stabilized,however,anti-clerical legislation proliferated,particularly between 1879 and 1922. Ellis unearths the little-known story of a conservative Catholic agent, Auguste Pécoul (1837–1916), to show how the energies of late-nineteenth-century Catholicism were weakened by multiple internal rivalries. Despite her meticulous archival research, however, she does not spell out its broader implications. It is difficult today to realize, what with all the jolly youngsters strumming guitars and performing their own compositions at services, and with Catholic cantors leading congregations through lilting melodies, that Gregorian plainchant (named after Gregory the Great, sixth century) had been the musical basis of Catholic liturgy for centuries. Substantial sections were declaimed rather than spoken, by a chorus of monks or nuns singing an unaccompanied monadic (one-part) line. Such performance connoted the harmony of a better world than ours, the healthful austerity of a life of devotion and service, the joy of praising God, and the exclusion of lay people except as passive spectators of holy rites. Solesmes (since 1837, the mother abbey of the Benedictine monks in France) came to dominate the production of Catholic editions of plainchant worldwide—a lucrative business. Plainchant styles varied mainly depending on which syllables were accentuated, on their relative length, and on the degree of melisma (ornamental extra notes on certain syllables)—if any—that was permitted. Pécoul had been a novice at Solesmes from 1860–63, until his brother died and his mother persuaded him to marry to perpetuate the family line. He became a diplomat, serving for a time at the Holy See. With contacts in both religious and political circles,he used many pseudonyms to create the impression that he was many different interest groups, while loyally defending the interests of Solesmes against German and Belgian publishers. He enlisted the support of French printers’unions, which feared the loss of their jobs; of factions in theVatican favorable to France; and of secular French nationalists still smarting at Bismarck’s triumph over France in 1870.The German Friedrich Pustet had been granted a qualified monopoly over plainchant publishing that lasted until 1898.If generalized and enforced by theVatican,it would have ruined several French publishers.Because many musicians considered that French plainchant was crude, “a series of undifferentiated syllables hammered out with no thought for semantics, pacing, phrasing, or line” (22), Pécoul had to invoke the values of tradition and authenticity. When his friend, the plainchant editor Dom Pothier, left Solesmes, and when alternative French editions by Dom Mocquereau, which used more extensive markings to indicate musical expression, became popular,Pécoul’s loyalties toward French plainchant itself became divided.Ellis tells this complicated story well. Oberlin College (OH) Affiliate Scholar Laurence M. Porter Hawthorne, Melanie C. Finding the Woman Who Didn’t Exist: The Curious Life of Gisèle d’Estoc. Lincoln: UP of Nebraska, 2013. ISBN 978-0-8032-4034-6. Pp. 216. $35. This fascinating, highly readable book is not what one expects at first glance. Indeed, contrary to what Hawthorne states in her introduction—“This is a book about Gisèle d’Estoc” (1)—it is actually about much more. Yes, it is about this relatively unknown French artist and writer who lived during the last half of the nineteenth century and was well connected to the worlds of art and literature during the 1880s and later. Her true identity and accomplishments are discovered and revealed here. Yet, Hawthorne adeptly—and entertainingly—uses her research project on d’Estoc to reflect on research in the humanities, archival research, the writing of biography, truth and narrative, reasoning and discovery: “This book, then, is partly about what researchers in...

The Women Who Ruled China: Buddhism, Multiculturalism, and Governance in the Sixth Century By Stephanie Balkwill. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2024. 272 pp. $34.95 (paper)

The Women Who Ruled China: Buddhism, Multiculturalism, and Governance in the Sixth Century, written by Stephanie Balkwill