Reflecting the Past is the first English-language study to address the role of historiography in medieval Japan, an age at the time widely believed to be one of irreversible decline. Drawing on a decade of research, including work with medieval manuscripts, it analyzes a set of texts-eight Mirrors-that recount the past in an effort to order the world around them. They confront rebellions, civil war, "China," attempted invasions, and even the fracturing of the court into two lines. To interrogate the significance for medieval writers of narrating such pasts as a Mirror, Erin Brightwell traces a series of innovations across these and related texts that emerge in the face of disorder. In so doing, she uncovers how a dynamic web of evolving concepts of time, place, language use, and cosmological forces was deployed to order the past in an age of unprecedented social movement and upheaval.

Despite the Mirrors' common concerns and commitments, traditional linguistic and disciplinary boundaries have downplayed or obscured their significance for medieval thinkers. Through their treatment here as a multilingual, multi-structured genre, the Mirrors are revealed, however, as the dominant mode for reading and writing the past over almost three centuries of Japanese history.

About the Author
Erin L. Brightwell is Assistant Professor of Pre-modern Japanese Literature at the University of Michigan.

Reviews
The originality of the approach produces a host of startling juxtapositions and trenchant questions that will stimulate and challenge any scholar of the medieval period. -- Brian Steininger * Journal of Japanese Studies *
A major contribution to our understanding of premodern Japanese historiography; this review cannot do justice to the breadth and richness of Brightwell's research, which answers important questions and raises many more...We should be grateful to Erin Brightwell for undertaking such a monumental task. Reflecting the Past's sweep and ambition are remarkable; its arguments will compel scholars to fundamentally rethink how they approach not only mirrors but other well-known works like Gukansho and Jinno shotoki as well. -- David Spafford * Monumenta Nipponica *



Book Information
ISBN 9780674247819
Author Erin L. Brightwell
Format Hardback
Page Count 336
Imprint Harvard University Press
Publisher Harvard University Press