This volume assembles thirteen essays on topics from the Spring and Autumn period down to the Northern Song, drawing on primary sources ranging from standard historiographical and philosophical classics to excavated texts, bellettristic works in various genres, anomaly accounts, and Buddhist scriptural and hagiographical traditions. As the title indicates, the unifying thread through what is in many regards a quite disparate set of essays is a shared focus on one variety or another of violation of standards of moral or proper behavior. Both in terms of the range of periods and topics and of the analytical frameworks adopted, the authors have taken their mandate to reflect on “bad behavior” in early and medieval Chinese sources in markedly divergent directions, but on the aggregate the volume provides an engaging introduction both to some relatively understudied issues as well as new perspectives on some canonical works and methodological problems.The essays are grouped into three sections—though as is natural, there are recurrent themes and issues that bridge across these sections. A first group centers on canonical traditionalist ethical categories: obligations of child to parent (including stepparent or parent-in-law) and obligations of minister to ruler. The first two essays, by Keith Knapp and Cong Ellen Zhang, explore narrative traditions relating to cases of shocking unfiliality toward parents or parents-in-law; Knapp's essay focuses on the early medieval and Tang eras, while Zhang's examines the burgeoning world of popular narratives on similar themes from the Song. Paul Goldin contributes an essay on traditional accounts of incest between sons and stepmothers or birth mothers, situating such narratives in the early Chinese ethnographic imaginary as it related to steppe peoples and their cultures. The section concludes with an essay by Anthony Barbieri-Low combing excavated sources from the Shuihudi 睡虎地 cache and a sampling of other entombed texts for the light they can shed on the thorny administrative and rhetorical difficulties encountered in promulgating ideals of official probity and public-spiritedness during the early years of the Western Han empire.In the volume's second section, second-order reflections on the definition and application of criteria for moral judgment predominate over first-order documentation of violations. The essay by Miranda Brown and Alexandra Fodde-Reguer on discussions of mourning ritual in Ying Shao's 應劭 (ca. 153–196)1Fengsu tongyi 風俗通義 would in some ways fit equally well alongside the discussions of filial piety in the first section, but the focus in this essay is not on accounts of unfilial behavior per se but on thinking through the seemingly paradoxical ways in which Ying Shao articulates his criteria for proper ritual behavior. The remaining essays in this section treat instances where the categories in which bad behavior is critiqued seem themselves potentially open to interpretation or alternative evaluation. Vincent Leung's essay focuses on the Eastern Han writer Zhao Yi 趙壹 (ca. 130–185) and his argument that the burgeoning trend among his contemporaries toward fetishizing and imitating masters of cursive writing was at best a pointless distraction and at worst morally pernicious. Leslie Wallace provides a survey of the often ambivalent attitudes reflected in Han to early medieval writings on falconry. Edwin Van Bibber-Orr assembles Northern Song anecdotes and poems on the downsides of what often seems to be the natural second occupation of Chinese literati—drinking—in an effort to bring these sources into dialogue with the modern-day clinical language of substance abuse. The final essay in this section, by N. Harry Rothschild, unpacks the elusive but politically explosive import of a moment of calculated indecorum in an anecdote about the late seventh-century Buddhist monk Xue Huaiyi 薛懷義 (?–695), whose decoding involves reading through and across the sometimes incommensurable values and standards of Buddhist communities, imperial favorites, and court officials as well as the gender and sexual politics in play around the court of Huaiyi's patron Wu Zetian 武則天 (624–705)—a complex and treacherous landscape in which Huaiyi himself did not survive for long.The volume's final section comprises four essays that in one way or another deal with problems of treachery, violence, and cruelty, including both how these are represented in the primary sources (and alternately condemned or papered over) and how modern readers might in turn attempt to understand these sources and their significance. Eric Henry's contribution examines the seemingly irreconcilable conflicts in traditional stories of Ji Kangzi 季康子 (?–468 BCE) and Shusun Muzi 叔孫穆子 (also known as Shusun Bao 豹; ?–538 BCE), Lu aristocrats and rough contemporaries of Confucius and his school, who at times appear as exemplars of wisdom or ritual discernment but are also reported to have acted on occasion with casual depravity and murderous violence. Henry's discussion—drawing on a range of early sources but with particular focus on the often dark and unsettling narrative world of the Zuo zhuan 左傳—ponders the implications of a recognition that for such figures, “the public exercise of virtue was as much an instrument of realpolitik as the private exercise of violence” (173); indeed, one might even further query just how “private” the violence needed to be. An essay by Hongjie Wang catalogs shocking accounts of wanton slaughter and refinements of cruelty attributed to military commanders, bandits, and regime founders (categories that frequently overlapped in medieval China as throughout human history) from the waning years of the Tang through the Five Dynasties period. Two final essays, by Jinhua Chen and Kelly Carlton, take up cases of ordained Buddhist monks who assumed potentially problematic roles in military and political affairs: Chen's essay centers on the case of Faya 法雅 (?–629), who mustered warrior-monks in the cause of the Tang founder Li Yuan 李淵 (566–635) in the early years of the dynasty and whose downfall coincided with Li Yuan's forced abdication at the hands of his son Li Shimin 李世民 (598–649) and the latter's consolidation of power. By teasing out the discrepancies among various accounts of Faya's career in standard historical sources as well as in the hagiography of Faya's harsh critic Zhishi 智實 (601–638)2 in the Xu Gaoseng zhuan 續高僧傳, by the Buddhist historian and polemicist Daoxuan 道宣 (596–667), Chen reminds us of the need to evaluate even (and perhaps especially) our earliest sources in terms of their own political and ideological agendas, observing that the designation “evil monk” in practice singles out not monks who fell into morally dubious political entanglements but rather those for whom such entanglements ended badly. Carlton's essay extends this brand of critical reevaluation of controversial Buddhist monks to the trans-regional career of the Korean monk Sinseong 信誠 (fl. late seventh c.), who successfully conspired to open the gates of the Gogureo capital of Pyongyang to a Tang and Silla invasion force in 668. While such an act might seem the very emblem of treason, and while it directly and predictably led to massive destruction and loss of life, Carlton shows that Sinseong not only went on to enjoy an eminent and successful career as a monk-official in the Tang but also, with local exceptions, largely escaped condemnation for his behavior in the historical record. Carlton's examination of accounts of Sinseong's life reminds us of how medieval standards of political or personal loyalty, and even human decency, were readily subsumed in ecumenical ideals, whether the religious ecumenism of Buddhism or the ecumenical order of empire itself, transcending what moderns would typically construe as national boundaries.As suggested by such an overview, the range of directions that the inquiry into “behaving badly” takes here is indeed dizzyingly varied. Variety in interpretive approach is in principle certainly an asset rather than a shortcoming for such a volume; nonetheless, at times one wishes for a more sustained sense of a conversation or simply a clearer sense of a shared or interlocking set of interpretive questions across the contributions. I will offer some thoughts below on possible directions for further inquiry or for fleshing out some of the connections that remain implicit in the volume.The project of focusing on “bad” rather than exemplary behavior is intrinsically tricky to implement. The notion of an understudied alternative archive of deviance for traditional China, autonomous from an overstudied and stiflingly moralistic main canon, is at best a heuristic fiction not borne out in general in our actual archive of available sources—nor, for that matter, in the range of source materials explored in this volume. In part this state of affairs stems from the fact that “deviance” is not an autonomous sphere of human experience but rather is just as logically dependent on dominant norms as is “normality” itself. As amply demonstrated by the source references in this volume, moreover, stories about bad behavior have themselves always been one of the most favored and powerful resources for the promotion of orthodox morality, in early traditionalist texts and particularly in every conceivable variety of historical writing, not excluding such writing produced in Buddhist circles. The editors' introduction observes of our own cultural moment that “the aberrant, the notorious, the profligate, and the scandalous disturb and titillate us, exerting a greater pull on the mind and heart than the righteous, the law-abiding, and the conventional” (1). The twenty-first-century word clickbait suffices to suggest the justice of this observation, but it would also have been interesting to reflect more systematically on the ample evidence that a similar principle held equally in traditional China, where the seemingly universal human appetite for salacious stories materially shaped even some of the most revered canons and traditions.3A natural response to the interpretive challenges posed by traditional accounts of deviant behavior is to acknowledge that we are in effect dealing at least as much with histories of representation as with historical behavior. Some such conception is reflected in several biographical source studies included here, such as Rothschild's study on Xue Huaiyi, Henry's on Ji Kangzi and Shusun Muzi, or Chen's and Carlton's studies of Faya and Sinseong, all of which attempt to tease out the disparate agendas and perspectives that already profoundly shaped even the earliest accounts. At times the arguments advanced smack somewhat of proofs that the emperor has no clothes—it would be interesting to envision what these source studies might look like if framed from the outset for an audience that already knew that (in the terms of the allegory) emperors have never had any clothes.4 In other instances, however, the methodological or critical perspective on the source material seems more difficult to ascertain, as a straight descriptive mode predominates. Hongjie Wang's account of the “brutal martial legacy of the Five Dynasties” (202), for example, offers chilling examples of the (sadly ubiquitous) historiographical subgenre of the catalog of cruelty, but it remains difficult to distinguish between the author's own perspective on the sources and the underlying historical events, on the one hand, and the ideology and aims of the Northern Song historians who produced the accounts, on the other, or to divine the critical or methodological agenda of the study.Critical reflection on histories of deviancy also naturally draws our attention to the historical contingencies through which given behaviors have been categorized and deemed deviant in a particular era. In this spirit Goldin's essay on incest narratives begins by noting that just as it often requires considerable historical imagination to recover the humor in ancient jokes, the landscape of sexual deviancy in early imperial and medieval China may seem alien to us—as suggested by the absence of any category in the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) singling out a category of incest between son and deceased father's concubine (56). What in Goldin's essay serves as an index of historical contingency, however, appears elsewhere in this volume as the emblem of timeless medical truth: Van Bibber-Orr's essay simply cites the DSM's definition of alcoholism for the diagnostic checklist that he then applies to assessments of Northern Song literati drinking (135–36). Such an exercise is not intrinsically without interest, but it would be desirable to incorporate a clearer sense of the potential methodological shortcomings of such a baldly ahistorical approach or at a minimum some explicit accounting of what the interpretive payoff of such an exercise might be.There are further instances of accomplished and insightful essays that one nonetheless might wish to see more explicitly linked to the volume's overarching interpretive questions. Barbieri-Low's essay on excavated texts relating to official misbehavior in the early years of the Western Han is a masterful introduction to these sources, with a generous anecdotal sampling of the sorts of local abuses that caused concern to the infant central government. As Barbieri-Low notes, our picture of a “wild west” holdover period from the wars and social disruption of the Qin and its aftermath, followed over the course of the second century BCE by a gradual shift toward a more orderly official culture and the rise of a semiregular recruitment system, remains more broad impression than documentable fact (83n34), but it would nonetheless be intriguing to try to address exactly what we see in these excavated texts from that “wild west” era that deviates, whether in substance, in narrative framing, or in ideological coloring (rather than simply in the granularity of the cases recorded), from later accounts in received sources—certainly none of the types of misbehavior noted here are remotely unfamiliar, either for later periods or in the standard histories. Brown and Fodde-Reguer's essay on Ying Shao's theory of ritual is insightful and elegantly argued, but by framing their argument as a refutation of the weak straw-man notion that traditionalist thought conceived of ritual as a “rule book,” they perhaps sell the potential relevance of Ying Shao's work in this context short.5 For Ying Shao himself, conceiving of ritual as a rule book was a fortiori never a live possibility; rather, in keeping with the guiding assumptions of earlier traditionalist ritual theory, he assumed that at its highest stage of perfection—for example, as exemplified in Confucius—it was expressed as an embodied knack of ad hoc situational response. The question for Ying Shao, as he makes clear in his Fengsu tongyi preface, was rather, given that Confucius's perfect embodied ritual knack was grounded in the specific historical circumstances of his age, How might latter-day aspirants to ritual competence successfully “translate” that same embodied knack into the vastly altered circumstances of their own world? Granted, his behavioral reference points are rather abstruse (and thus notably lacking in salacious appeal), but what Ying Shao is in effect formulating in this regard is a theory of the historical adaptability of standards of behavior.6These desultory comments are offered in the spirit of continuing the conversations either begun or left implicit across the essays of this volume. Many of the contributions included here will doubtless become go-to references in their particular subfields, and if the volume as a whole falls somewhat short of fully articulating a critical agenda for the study of “deviancy” in early and medieval sources, it has certainly opened up a rich range of possibilities for further exploration.