Epistolary Korea, the last book that JaHyun Kim Haboush saw to print before her untimely death, was a milestone in the study of Chosŏn. Through her editorship of this source collection, she created a bold vision of a “communicative space” formed by letter writing of all sorts, in all available linguistic registers, by people high and low. The Power of the Brush by Hwisang Cho, Haboush’s erstwhile student and a contributor to her volume, is thoroughly informed by this vision. Tying in with Haboush’s encompassing understanding of the “letter” as all writing with an addressee, Cho offers a multifaceted narrative of the changing topography of this communicative space throughout the Chosŏn era as seen through the lens of “epistolary practices.”The indebtedness to Epistolary Korea is also visible in the book’s structure. If the former arranges its source materials in a zooming-in fashion, starting with the most public genres and ending with the most intimate ones, The Power of the Brush develops in the opposite direction, from private to public. The introductory chapter interweaves the most important aspects of Chosŏn epistolary culture with the invention and diffusion of the Korean alphabet and can thus serve as a stimulating classroom introduction to Chosŏn literary culture. The main body of the book then sets in with a discussion of the “spiral letter,” where the sheet of paper is filled with writing in different directions. According to Cho, this is a peculiar style of mise-en-page that may have first been created by female writers and is, at any rate, confined to personal letters. The following chapter, chapter 3, turns to letters as medium of scholarly debate between individuals, arguing that with T’oegye’s edition and emulation of Zhu Xi’s letters, the scholarly letter became a canonical genre for Korean literati in a way unheard of in China. Chapter 4 situates scholars’ exchange of letters within the academy (sŏwŏn) movement and thus widens the focus beyond scholarly discourse to include the sociopolitical agendas worked out through correspondence. Chapter 5 extends the discussion from the exchange of news and political communication within the scholarly community, especially between academies, to joint memorials created through and supported by these networks and thus used to communication with the court. Chapter 6 examines the performative aspects of the submission of mass petitions (maninso) and traces the development of the protest culture around such joint memorials. An epilogue ties this history to its legacies in the modern age and to contemporary experiences of political use of communication technology. As this outline shows, the book follows a roughly chronological path: from the introduction of the Korean alphabet to the nineteenth-century maninso (with a focus on T’oegye and the Tosan academy in chapters 3 and 4). Yet it does so without imposing a facile storyline such as “from private to public” onto its object. To the contrary, the book makes an interesting point in emphasizing the emergence of all the important aspects of the epistolary communication space in the sixteenth century already, and the diminishing efficacy of joint memorials as a political tool—which, we learn, was the background to the creation of mass petitions in the first place.This is, in important ways, an excellent book that offers fresh perspectives on the nexus of writing and politics in the Chosŏn era. It also illustrates its general points by way of particular events retold in lively detail and often deftly analyzed. That not all of the practices interrogated in this study can possibly be called “epistolary” (e.g., the archival practices at the academies as treated in chapter 4) only adds to the book’s value as a richly informative and creative representation of elite communication channels in Chosŏn. The main argument brought forward by this book is the centrality of letter writing to the cultural and political process of Chosŏn Korea. In as far as “letter” is used synonymously with “written communication” in this book, this argument may border on the trivial. Yet, by describing phenomena such as T’oegye’s (self-)stylization as Zhu Xi’s intellectual heir or the ways in which scholarly communities were configured and enticed to action as communication processes, it very effectively brings their underlying dynamics to the fore. In that respect, this study is instructive and inspiring for scholars of the Chosŏn, and as a classroom resource, the book will be of much help in making Chosŏn cultural and political history comprehensible and approachable.At the same time, some caveats are due concerning this central argument, irrespective of its potential as a narrative device, as well as some of the subsidiary hypotheses. The claim that letter writing lay “at the heart of socio-cultural changes” (9) in the sixteenth century and thereafter is nowhere in the book tested against other possible factors, be they socioeconomic, political, or intellectual, or even against other modes of writing, such as nonofficial historiography, which also saw a surge during the sixteenth century. Is not the expansion of writing in general, rather than letter writing in particular, what needs to be explained, and is not Confucian education at least as plausible as the major force behind the expansion of writing as the diffusion of the alphabet? Another instance where scholarly caution may have been cast aside is the—certainly intriguing—description of “spiral letters” as a premeditated style serving purposes other than cramming more text on a sheet of paper than was originally planned by the writer.1 While Cho admits that the use of the form could have served different purposes (65), he seems to have prematurely precluded simple utilitarian purposes for the spiral letters. Similarly, the evidence adduced for the claim that it is because of a very specific “new written culture,” that is, due to Chosŏn literati’s special emphasis on the letter genre, that Zhu Xi’s teachings reigned supreme in Chosŏn can hardly be called conclusive. Both Benjamin Elman’s From Philology to Philosophy and Antje Richter’s Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China are quoted here (97) in such a way as to construe the misleading impression that letter writing held a far lesser place in late imperial China than it did in Chosŏn. However, when Richter states that letters “play no remarkable role in the Confucian canon,”2 she has the pre-Qin canon in mind, not the cultural place of letters in late imperial China. Elman is cited as source for the claim that in late imperial China, letters functioned only as “supplementary means to spread knowledge that could not be incorporated into books or essays.” Yet, the chapter to which Cho refers outlines precisely the importance of letters as a scholarly medium for Qing scholars.3Thus, the book’s messages should be taken with caution sometimes; however, they certainly have to be taken seriously. With its dexterous interweaving of synchronic and diachronic perspectives, with the rich detail it provides of Chosŏn communicative practices, and with its thorough consideration of material culture, The Power of the Brush is an important and very welcome addition to scholarship on Chosŏn cultural history.