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Printed with wooden movable type. 2, 1, 4, 46, 12, 11; 24, 33, 36; 23, 58; 37, 30; 81; 77; 51, 34, [1] folding leaves. 14 kw?n in seven vols. Small folio, orig. semi-stiff patterned wrappers, title & kw?n numbers handwritten on covers, old stitching. [Korea]: colophon dated 1897. First edition, and rare; WorldCat lists only the Harvard copy (accession number 31333684). This is a synthesis of Chinese and Korean practices surrounding the four "family rituals": general rites, coming of age (K. kwanrye ??), marriage, and funerals, written by Kim Ky?ng-yu (1698-1773), and edited and published by his descendant, employing wooden movable type. The Family Rituals, a collection of ritual prescriptions compiled by the great Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi ?? (1130-1200), was one of the most influential ritual texts in Ch?son Korea, more widely read, studied, adapted, reprinted, and circulated than the earlier and more canonical Classic of Ritual (Ch. Liji ??). This popularity of the Family Rituals was likely driven by the social influence of Confucian academies (K. s?w?n ??), local educational institutions that rendered Confucian learning available and accessible to aspiring scholars. As Martin Gehlmann observes in "Ritual and Confucian Academies in Korea" (in All About Rites, Collège de France, 2023), the Family Rituals figured largely in classroom curricula and was well represented in the library holdings of the academies, to a large degree because it was "eas[ier] to digest" than the "bulky classic" of rituals (p. 16). Furthermore, the practical and accessible nature of the Family Rituals lent itself to local adaptations by Korean scholars, as "many scholars continued to produce ritual works based on the Family Rit[uals] in order to simplify or recontextualize its concepts for the Korean readership" (p. 14). "Written by Korean authors with knowledge of local needs," these "partial derivatives" of the Family Rituals are best understood as reflections of the indigenization and vernacularization of Confucian knowledge systems in the Korean context, their humble self-designations as "commentaries," "summaries," or "explanations" of Chinese texts notwithstanding. "Rituals are carried out differently between antiquity and the present, and they have different uses from one place to another. Thus, adaptive variations are inevitable" from the colophon. Overtly addressing the differences in customs between the Florescence (i.e., China) and the East (i.e., Korea), the Orthodoxy and Variants of the Four Rites records and collates both classical prescriptions and localized practices of the family rituals on equal grounds. The first volumes (kw?n 1-3) deal with general rituals, followed by one kw?n each (4 and 5) on the coming-of-age and marriage rituals. The bulk of the work (kw?n 6-14) is devoted to the detailed discussion of funerary rites. The juxtaposition of Chinese and Korean variants of the same practice on the printed page is accompanied by an interesting visual feature: under each quotation from a Chinese source is printed a white circle, whereas a Korean source is followed by a dark circle. Preface in Vol. 1 by Song Ch i-gyu ??? (1759-1838), dated 1836, was written for a 10 kw?n edition of the work being prepared for publication by Kim Ky?ng-yu s grandson, though it is unclear if that edition was ever printed the colophon describes it as "recorded but not transmitted," and we find no copy of it in modern bibliographies. The colophon in Vol. 7, by Kim Chi-su ???, is dated 1897. Fine set, and a lovely example of Korean wooden movable type printing.
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