Confucianism and Family Rituals in Imperial China

A Social History of Writing about Rites
To explore the historical connections between Confucianism and Chinese society, this book examines the social and cultural processes through which Confucian texts on family rituals were written, circulated, interpreted, and used as guides to action. Weddings, funerals, and ancestral rites were central features of Chinese culture; they gave drama to
To explore the historical connections between Confucianism and Chinese society, this book examines the social and cultural processes through which Confucian texts on family rituals were written, circulated, interpreted, and used as guides to action. Weddings, funerals, and ancestral rites were central features of Chinese culture; they gave drama to transitions in people’s lives and conveyed conceptions of the hierarchy of society and the interdependency of the living and the dead. Patricia Ebrey’s social history of Confucian texts shows much about how Ch