In the medieval Eurasian cultural and geopolitical space, Byzantium and China stand out as two centralised imperial orders that drew on allegedly unbroken, in fact purposely constructed, traditions of classicising learning. In Byzantium, classicising learning (logoi, paideia) gained new life from the dialectics that characterised iconoclasm and its aftermath through the tenth to twelfth centuries and beyond, with concomitant changes to the canon. In medieval China, classicising learning (xue 學) was revived with the promotion of guwen 古文 (ancient style prose) by eighth-century thinkers and was subsequently taken up by reform-minded literati during the Northern (960–1127) and Southern Song (1127–1279) periods, resulting in on-going revisions of the canon and competing accounts of what it meant to carry out the ways of the ancients. Those who engaged in such learning were known as logioi/pepaideumenoi and shi 士 = literati, respectively.
PAIXUE examines paideia/logioi and xue/shi from two major angles. Its first strand, ‘Classicising learning and governance – performance of empire’, analyses literati interaction with the imperial/aristocratic elites through the prism of ritualised communication and the (social) performance of classicising learning, showing how the social ramifications of classical learning culminate in performative situations. The second project strand, ‘Classicising learning and the literatus – ethics, emotions, mimesis’, places the individual literatus centre-stage and looks at the role of learning and memorising classicising texts in the ethical and emotional configuration of a Byzantine and Tang/Song learned subject, ultimately empowering literati to withdraw from the pressures of the imperial system.
PAIXUE’s key objectives are to
— within comparative empire studies, explore the heuristic, analytic, descriptive and paradigmatic potential of classicising learning in the longue durée as a distinctive lens;
— analyse the function of performative situations in the maintenance of empire and elite interaction, and the double-edged impact of classicising learning on empire;
— analyse the role of classicising learning in the formation of literati subjectivity across cultures, particularly its impact on ethics and emotions;
— demonstrate the utility of (meta-)prosopographical databases, social network analysis, and mapping for researching the historical sociology of Byzantium;
— build an online resource for the promising new field of comparative Sino-Byzantine studies;
— explore ways in which cross-cultural research in the humanities can be made more meaningful.
The project takes into account a core period that ranges, for the Byzantine empire, from late antiquity to c.1350 and, for China, from the Tang through the Song periods (618–1279), with a focus on the tenth through twelfth centuries.
