Court Diary Research Articles

Women, Rites, and Ritual Objects in Premodern Japan ed. by Karen M. Gerhart

Reviewed by: Women, Rites, and Ritual Objects in Premodern Japan ed. by Karen M. Gerhart Yui Suzuki Women, Rites, and Ritual Objects in Premodern Japan. Edited by Karen M. Gerhart. Leiden: Brill, 2018. 412 pages. Hardcover, €132.00/ $159.00. It is the twenty-first century, and we are reminded time and again that women's voices continue to be silenced, erased, and ignored (as I write this in late 2018, Christine Blasey Ford and her allegations against Brett Kavanaugh prior to his confirmation as a US Supreme Court justice come immediately to mind). In the notably thoughtful preface of the volume under review, Barbara Ruch, citing Mary Beard, relates that in the ancient Western World rapists cut out the tongues of their victims to silence them, while in today's world "we have … 'more civilized' non-disclosure clauses and bank checks to achieve the muting effect" (p. x). Ruch sees here a parallel with the Japanese case, where today as much as in the premodern period covered by this book, women are not always taken seriously. Women, Rites, and Ritual Objects in Premodern Japan, edited by Karen M. Gerhart, is a welcome contribution of ten scholarly essays that fill a deep lacuna in Japanese studies by restoring some of the ignored, forgotten, or deliberately suppressed voices and lives of women in premodern Japan. The book's three themes—women, rites, and ritual objects—have always been of great interest to Gerhart. In editing the volume, she took care to ensure that it addressed larger cultural concerns "such as gender politics, the female body, class, and materiality" (p. 1). As a multidisciplinary examination of rituals and their objects—in this case featuring women and female deities—the current book follows a trajectory established with the publication of Gerhart's two earlier monographs, which interwove material culture studies, ritual studies, and art history.1 The book covers a historical span of roughly a millennium, from the eighth century to the end of the nineteenth century. Its ten essays, organized into four parts—"Rituals Related to Household and Childbirth" (with essays by Gerhart, Anna Andreeva, and Naoko Gunji); "Women and Buddhist Rituals and Icons" (Chari Pradel, Hank Glassman, and Sherry Fowler); "Buddhist Women and Death Memorials" (Patricia Fister and Monica Bethe); and "Female Patronage, Portraits, and Rituals" (Elizabeth Morrissey and Elizabeth Self)—all touch upon the issue of gender and female agency in Japanese art and ritual practice from one perspective or another. [End Page 85] One of the difficulties in uncovering what women were actually doing when it came to ritual activities is that most of the extant primary sources documenting rituals, such as court diaries, official histories, medical treatises, and Buddhist handbooks, were initiated and written by men. As explained in the book's introduction, even when women regularly documented their daily lives, the specifics were often left out. The essays demonstrate how the contributors overcame the challenge presented by a scarcity of written sources to illuminate the lives of women in premodern Japan, both as subjects and as objects of ritual activity. Two of the essays are notable for illuminating the role of elite women in the performance of ritual. First, in chapter 1, Gerhart examines the active participation of aristocratic Heian women in a complex set of yin-yang rituals known as shintaku ishi that were prescribed by yin-yang masters (onmyōji) when a household moved to a new residence. Meanwhile chapter 9, by Elizabeth Morrissey, analyzes two extant sources, the fourteenth-century illustrated handscroll Ishiyamadera engi e (Illustrated Legends of Ishiyamadera) and the eleventh-century text Eiga monogatari (A Tale of Flowering Fortunes), and proposes that Higashisanjō-in (962–1002), the tenth-century consort of Emperor En'yū (959–991; r. 969–984) and mother of Emperor Ichijō (980–1011; r. 986–1011), was one of the key female patrons of Ishiyamadera and an avid devotee of its main object of worship, a "secret icon" (hibutsu; a Buddhist image hidden from view) of Nyoirin Kannon (Sk. Cintamāṇicakra). By Higashisanjō-in's time, this important temple already had a well-established reputation among elite women as a miraculous site. Ishiyamadera's Nyoirin Kannon image was particularly...

Judicial Indicators for Credit Markets in SSo Paulo

This paper presents a new generation of judicial indicators for the credit markets proposed by Castro (2016), extracted from court diaries and websites in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The first generation was limited to counting of new, judicial cases pertaining to certain classes of disputes related to credit contracts, such as foreclosures of debt instruments and search and seizure in fiduciary liens, among other liabilities. Although that type of measure was significantly useful for tracking non-performing loans and to some extent, for improving macroeconomic forecasts, it suffered from a basic limitation, namely every contract under dispute weighs the same in the overall index. A natural extension of the measure is therefore, capturing unit values of the credits or claims under dispute, based on samples of cases on a monthly basis. In addition to unit values, we propose indicators based on other moments of the sample distribution of cases, such as the 10%, 50% and 90% percentiles, allowing for the distribution of judicial claims to change its shape along depending of the phase of the credit cycle. Another relevant improvement relatively to the first version is the significant increase of the sample period for the indicators: whereas the first version begun in October/2007, in this version dates back to September/2001. Besides computing aggregate, unit values of bad credits, the structure of the database allows slicing and dicing of the data to produce proxies of market conditions for specific segments of credit contracts, according to the nature of debtors (personal or corporate, small versus large firms) or creditors (banks versus non-banks) and the economic sector (industry, services, agriculture). Identification of the sector of firms is based on machine learning algorithms whereas other attributes are determined by regular expressions. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the predictive ability of judicial indicators that are based on the case values of judicial claims, comparing forecasts with those obtained from baseline models that include traditional macroeconomic indicators. We conclude that the new indicators retain all the properties of the original indicators namely ease of computation and timeliness, confirming their potential as leading or coincident indicators of economic activity and moreover, their suitability for nowcasting.

New Chapters in the History of Early Modern Ashkenaz

Shlomo Berger. Producing Redemption in Amsterdam: Early Modern Yiddish Books in Paratextual Perspective. Studies in Jewish History and Culture 37. Boston and Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2013. Pp. xx + 234.Elisheva Carlebach. Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, Mass, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. Pp. xii + 304.Edward Fram. A Window on Their World: The Court Diaries of Rabbi Hayyim Gundersheim, Frankfurt am Main, 1773-1794. Cincinnati, Ohio: Hebrew Union College Press, 2012. Pp. 653.Debra Kaplan. Beyond Expub ion: Jews, Chrbtians, and Reformation Strasbourg. Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011. Pp. xviii + 254.Robert Liberies. Jews Webome Coffee: Tradition and Innovation in Early Modern Germany. The Tauber Institute Series for Study of European Jewiy. Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2012. Pp. xx + 169.Among cultural turns of second half of twentieth century, translational turn has shaped Jewish studies most profoundly. Analyses of cross-cultural translation and emerging concepts of cultural transfer and entangled histories have led to a new Jewish history, told in relationship to that of surrounding majority.1 While earlier studies that marked emerging historiographic trend in mid-1990s studied Jewish and Christian perceptions of each and JewishChristian interaction expressif verbis? in postmodern age, a notion of cultural embeddedness has become a presumed factor in telling of Jewish history; rather than being an end in itself, cultural entanglement between Jews and the other has become a key to opening yet broader questions. A similar shift now treats Jews as active participants of history, and not its passive objects: Jews were not merely influenced by events or cultural developments in Christian or Muslim worlds but were major historical actors in towns, villages, and lands where they lived, making active use of and forming conditions of life they encountered (Kaplan, p. 6). They were agents of cultural change, partners in cultural encounter (even if politically weak vis-a-vis a dominant other).2 3This review essay discusses a number of recent works on history of early modem Ashkenaz that exemplify this shift. Thrs is not meant to be an exhaustive survey but rather a selection of five works from scholars from United States, Israel, and Europe that I believe are exemplary for their holistic approach to Ashkenazi culture in sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Each honors a fundamental principal of new cultural history, namely, inclusion of voices of ordinary people and everyday culture. Based on understanding that history of Ashkenazrc Jewry is not limrted to extraordinary moments (Kaplan, p. 7) and texts written by for elite (Fram, p. 70), works under review draw on sources that have hitherto been overlooked: Jewish calendars, Yiddish paratexts, and coffee.The strategy of accessing nonelite through an unexpected source is vrsible in Shlomo Berger's Producing Redemption in Amsterdam: Early Modern Yiddish Books in Paratextual Perspective. Berger analyzes paratexts-texts subsidiary to a book's main text-of Yiddish books produced in Amsterdam, main center of Hebrew book production in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and distributed throughout Ashkenazi diaspora. Extending new field of paratextology, a subfield of book history, for first time to Jewish books, Berger treats paratexts as a key to understanding Yiddish book production, early modem Yiddish literary corpus, cultural meaning of these books, and their roles in Ashkenazi culture and society. He demonstrates that how books in Ashkenazi vernacular are presented for public consumption tells us something about world of their authors, producers, and readers. …

Multiple Siyin Half Seals


 
 
 This paper takes an initial but significant step toward penetrating the intricate historiography of the renowned siyin (“official seal”) half seal, which appears on 199 surviving or now-lost canonical Chinese paintings and calligraphies. Through a forensic tracking of the siyin art pieces, Ming dynasty court diaries, legal statutes, and other official seals ending in the words si and yin, I refute the dominant twentieth-century theory by arguing that this seal could not have originated from the eunuch-run Dianli jicha si (Office of Regulations and Investigations) in 1373–84, nor could it have been used by the Ming general Xu Da (1332–1385) on the Yuan palace collection as previously hypothesized. The alleged Dianli jicha si characters do not match the siyin seal strokes. New evidence suggests that the siyin seal came into existence after 1385, by which time the Directorate of Ceremonial (1385–1644) had superseded the shuttered Dianli jicha si office. Instead of simply dividing the various siyin seal impressions into binary genuine/forged categories as past studies have done, I demonstrate that three types of siyin seals can be considered authentic, all of which were used by different branches of the jingli si (registry office). The fact that a half seal was employed suggests that the jingli si registry office followed the kanhe inventory system, which imposed an official seal on the seam of both an inventorying object and its complementary ledger. By deconstructing the siyin historiography, this paper raises new socio-political questions about ownership, censorship, and imperial competition over the siyin-marked art pieces. It also builds a foundation for the further investigation of the role inventory systems played in mapping, defining, and legitimizing the royal power of the Ming dynasty.
 
 

Childbirth in aristocratic households of Heian Japan

This paper focuses on childbirth in Japan's aristocratic households during the Heian period (794-1185). Drawing on various sources, including court diaries, visual sources, literary records, and Japan's first medical collection, with its assortment of gynaecological and obstetric prescriptions, as well as Buddhist and other ritual texts, this short excursion into the cultural history of childbirth offers an insight into how childbirth was experienced and managed in Heian Japan. In particular, it addresses the variety of ideas, knowledge systems and professionals involved in framing and supporting the process of childbirth in elite households. In so doing, it casts light on the complex background of early Japanese medicine and healthcare for women.

The Court Diary of Justice William O. Douglas

The Court Diary of Justice William O. Douglas

The Court Diary of Justice William O. Douglas: Preface

The Court Diary of Justice William O. Douglas Preface Sheldon S. Cohen I first met William 0. Douglas in 1957. I was working as a tax attorney in the Washing­ ton office of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. Carol Agger (Mrs. Abe Fortas), who was a partner, asked me to go to the Supreme Court to meet Justice Douglas to discuss his income tax planning. Justice Douglas had sev­ eral books in progress at the time and was a regu­ lar speaker atuniversities and other forums. The Justice was sitting at his desk in an open-neck sport shirt and trousers when I met him. We discussed his financial and tax situation, and I went off to do his planning. From that time until his death in 1975, we were close friends. In fact, we were almost like family. He came to our home often, always for our Passover Seder and for the children’s birth­ days, and other occasions. We were at his home for New Year’s Eve and many other occasions. Ifthe Justice received a first day cover ofa new stamp, he often sent it to one ofmy children as a gift. His will was drafted by Betty Fletcher, now Circuit Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The Justice named Betty, Dr. Tom Connolly (his personal physician), and me as his executors. Betty, however, was unable to serve as she was appointed to the Court ofAppeals by President Carter. The Justice’s will instructed us to leave his Court papers to the Library of Congress. His gift of the pre-Court papers to the Library was made in 1957 and it was one ofthe early items I handled for him. We delivered 1,784 boxes of papers, which comprise one of the prize collec­ tions of materials regarding the thirty-five years during which the Justice served. He took careful notes of every conference of the Court and tried to write in his log his impression of what every Justice thought about every impor­ tant point on the case. It is a remarkable histori­ cal log of his Court years. Justice Douglas had the longest Court service of anyone yet to serve. One of the items the Justice left was a hand­ written diary, which starts March 19, 1939; the day President Roosevelt informed him he was to be appointed to fill Justice Brandeis’ vacancy. The diary covers the first year and one half of his service on the Court and runs through Octo­ ber 19, 1940. We all think that this remarkable log of a vital period of our history, just before World War II, is a great addition to the history of the Court. ...

The Inner Palace Diary (Nei ch’i-chü chu)

Ta"8 Studies 4 (1986) The Inner Palace Diary (Nei ch'i-chii chul DENIS TWITCHETT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY It is common knowledge that the material for the T'ang Veritable Records (shih-Iu), and later the National History (kuoshih ) and the Chiu Tang-shu began with the compilation of the Court Diary, the formal account of the emperor's daily proceedings in open court. This was later supplemented by the Record of Administrative Affairs (shih-cheng chi) which recorded the emperor's discussions with his Chief Ministers during the private meeting that was held after the dismissal of the formal court. This latter record was only spasmodically kept during a few short periods of the T'ang. When it was kept, it was forwarded together with the Court Diary to the Historiographical Office where the diaries became the major source for the Veri table Records of each reign.! The Court Diary and Record of Administrative Affairs dealt in very considerable detail with the public acts of the Emperor and of his administration. However, there is nothing in the official histories or in any of the existing studies of T'ang historiography to suggest that any formal record was kept of his personal activities in the palace.2 Such a record would have been of more than minor importance, since the ruler spent the greater IThese matters are discussed in great detail in my forthcoming book, Official Historiography under the Tang, of which this article will form a short section. ZJ:n this connection it is worth remembering that the earliest mentions of the Court Diary, dating from the Han period, seem to refer not to a Court Diary in the later sense, but to a Palace Record kept by the ladies of the imperial household . The Sui shu monograph on literature traces the Diaries of Activity and Repose back to the Ch'i-chii chu said to have been kept in the Inner Palace during the reign of Han Wu-ti (140-87 BC), and to that kept for Ming-ti of the Later Han (58-75 AD) by his empress nee Ma. See Hou Han shu (Peking, 1965), 10A.410. The monograph also speculates that they may have originated as inner palace records kept by women scribes. See Sui shu (Peking, 1973) 33.966; Sui shu ching-chi chih (Shanghai, 1955),49. Modern scholarship disputes this account of the origins of the Diaries of Activity and Repose. Charles S. Gardner, Chinese Traditional Historiography (Cambridge, Mass., 1938), 88, disposes of the record connecting the diaries with Wu-ti's time, pointing out that the only evidence for this comes from a spurious text, the Hsi-ching tsa-chi. Hans Bielenstein, "The Restoration of the Han Dynasty; with Prolegomena on the Historiography of the Hou Han shu," 1 Ta噓,stud辺 4 (1986) The Inner Palace Diary (Nei ch'i-chii chul DENISTWITCHETT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY It is common knowledge that the material for the T'ang Veritable Records (shih-lu), and later the National History (kuoshih ) and the Chiu Tang-shu began with the compilation of the Court Diary, the formal account of the emperor's daily proceedings in open court. This was later supplemented by the Record of Administrative Affairs (shih-cheng chi) which recorded the emperor's discussions with his Chief Ministers during the private meeting that was held after the dismissal of the formal court. This latter record was only spasmodically kept during a few short periods of the T'ang. When it was kept, it was forwarded together with the Court Diary to the Historiographical Office where the diaries became the major source for the Veritable Records of each reign.I The Court Diary and Record of Administrative Affairs dealt in very considerable detail with the public acts of the Emperor and of his administration. However, there is nothing in the official histories or in any of the existing studies of T'ang historiography to suggest that any formal record was kept of his personal activities in the palace.2 Such a record would have been of more than minor importance, since the ruler spent the greater lThesematters are discussedin great detail in my forthcomingbook,Official HistoriographyundertheTang, ofwhichthis...

A Spanish Statesman of Appeasement: Medina De Las Torres and Spanish Policy 1639–1970

In spite of the current renaissance of interest and research in the history of Habsburg Spain, very little of significance has yet appeared in English on the post-Olivares period of Spanish government and policy – the period in which the Spanish monarchy declined from a position of European hegemony to that of a second-rate power, the virtually helpless prey of her continental and maritime adversaries. The nineteenth-century histories of Dunlop and Hume, which interspersed sections of court diaries with superficial, descriptive chronicles of foreign and military affairs, were not substantially improved upon by R. Trevor Davies' (admittedly posthumous) study of Spain in Decline. The more recent I studies by Professors Elliott, Lynch and Domínguez Ortiz tend to be somewhat exiguous on the years following the great crisis of 1640 (albeit to differing extents) whilst displaying a common freshness of approach and presentation. This is quite understandable, since the situation in Spanish historiography itself is not much better. The uniformly dismal, perhaps still humiliating, features of this period are a natural deterrent to study in contemporary Spain. Domínguez Ortiz and Valiente apart, researched monographs are non-existent, and it has been left to the Anglo-Saxons to venture, on a modest scale, into the uncharted territories of administrative and monetary history.

The Superior Court Diary of William Samuel Johnson, 1772-1773

The Superior Court Diary of William Samuel Johnson, 1772-1773

The Superior Court Diary of William Samuel Johnson, 1772-1773

The Superior Court Diary of William Samuel Johnson, 1772-1773

The Superior Court Diary of William Samuel Johnson, 1772-1773

The Superior Court Diary of William Samuel Johnson, 1772-1773

The Superior Court Diary of Samuel Johnson, 1772-1773, with Appropriate Records and File Papers of the Superior Court of the Colony of Connecticut for the Terms, December, 1772, through March, 1773

The Superior Court Diary of Samuel Johnson, 1772-1773, with Appropriate Records and File Papers of the Superior Court of the Colony of Connecticut for the Terms, December, 1772, through March, 1773

The Superior Court Diary of William Samuel Johnson, 1772–1773, with Appropriate Records and File Papers of the Superior Court of the Colony of Connecticut for the Terms, December, 1772, Through March, 1773. Edited by <italic>John T. Farrell</italic>, Associate Professor of History, the College of New Rochelle. Foreword by Charles E. Clark, United States Circuit Judge, Second Circuit. [American Legal Records,

The Superior Court Diary of William Samuel Johnson, 1772–1773, with Appropriate Records and File Papers of the Superior Court of the Colony of Connecticut for the Terms, December, 1772, Through March, 1773. Edited by <italic>John T. Farrell</italic>, Associate Professor of History, the College of New Rochelle. Foreword by Charles E. Clark, United States Circuit Judge, Second Circuit. [American Legal Records,

The Superior Court Diary of William Samuel Johnson, 1772-1773

The Superior Court Diary of William Samuel Johnson, 1772-1773

The Superior Court Diary of William Samuel Johnson, 1772-1773. Edited by John T. Farrell. With a foreword by Charles E. Clark. American Legal Records, Vol. IV. (Washington, D. C.: The American Historical Association, 1942. lxv + 293 pp. Table of cases.)

The Superior Court Diary of William Samuel Johnson, 1772-1773. Edited by John T. Farrell. With a foreword by Charles E. Clark. American Legal Records, Vol. IV. (Washington, D. C.: The American Historical Association, 1942. lxv + 293 pp. Table of cases.)

American Legal Records, Vol. 4: The Superior Court Diary of William Samuel Johnson, 1772-1773

American Legal Records, Vol. 4: The Superior Court Diary of William Samuel Johnson, 1772-1773