Panizzi Lecture 2: The Publishing Boom of Early Modern China and Late-Ming Book Culture

In this second lecture in the Panizzi series, Cynthia Brokaw considers the dawn of early modern China, the growth of commerce and the rapid increase in the population of city dwellers and how this spurred a publishing boom.

We explore both the high and the low ends of the lively book culture of the late Ming period. Commercial publishers published exquisitely illustrated novels, dramas, painting catalogues, and erotic albums.

At the same time, they eagerly sought out – and helped to create – a broader reading public by churning out a range of inexpensive popular texts including household encyclopedias, vernacular explanations of the Classics and cheaply-illustrated fiction designed to meet the needs and tastes of humbler readers.

Cynthia Brokaw is Professor of History and East Asian Studies and Chen Family Professor of Chinese Studies at Brown University, where she teaches early modern Chinese history. Her research focuses on the social history of publishing and book culture in China, with particular attention to the relationship between the growth of commercial publishing and the development of a large commoner reading public in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.