Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the eleventh-century anthology Wakan rōeishū (Japanese and Chinese-style Chanting Collection) and its medieval commentary tradition were reworked into calligraphic and literary models for early modern readers.

Paper long abstract:

The eleventh-century anthology Wakan rōeishū (和漢朗詠集, Japanese and Chinese-style Chanting Collection) was a key resource for premodern literary education; its single encyclopaedic arrangement of both Chinese-style couplets and Japanese waka made it a sourcebook for poetic and calligraphic training across varied styles of literary language. This paper considers how the flourishing medieval culture of lectures, written commentaries, and manuscript copying surrounding this anthology was inherited and adapted by early modern scholars as audiences grew and changed in the age of print.

The multifaceted nature of the Wakan rōeishū let scholars adapt it readily to a variety of aims: from Kitamura Kigin's 1671 commentary, which offered contemporary poets full annotations for the waka alongside a condensed and updated version of a medieval kanshi commentary, to an eighteenth-century visual commentary with illustrations in the top margin representing key poetic words and phrases, to nineteenth-century editions that reframed the anthology in a scholarly format customarily used for 'Chinese classics'. Changes in publishing format and commentarial approach had the power to promote different aspects of this multipurpose anthology. Was the Wakan rōeishū to be read as a traditional work of Chinese studies scholarship, as a glimpse into an idealized Heian golden age of court literature, or as a sourcebook for contemporary waka or haikai composition? Or was its primary value as a calligraphic copybook, to be retraced by hand and appreciated for its varied visual styles? To what extent did these functions conflict with or reinforce each other? By surveying several different incarnations of the Wakan rōeishū and considering specific circulating copies with patterns of wear and practice strokes in the margins, this paper takes a first exploratory look at how early modern audiences used this anthology within their everyday lives as readers and writers.