Paper short abstract:

This paper reintegrates materiality and text to show meanings lost in the separation. Expanding the act usually called ‘reading’ to the hand and eye, a 1713 calligraphy book, an item typically thought to offer women a means to better themselves, will be shown to be a source of aesthetic enjoyment.

Paper long abstract:

In the early Edo period, enterprising booksellers identified women as a lucrative potential market and a range of books were targeted at them. Many works for women were aimed at their self-improvement, and this paper is concerned with those commonly understood to be manuals to help women with their writing – that is, with formulating polite correspondence, and with brushing beautiful letterforms, both signals of a woman’s cultural sophistication and social standing. Nyohitsu copybooks were a type of work that encompassed both aspects of writing, the linguistic and the material. Meaning the ‘woman’s brush’, the word signified both a publishing genre and a type of calligraphy particularly used for letters. This paper examines one particular work, Sazareishi, ‘The Sacred Rock’, first published 1713 in Kyoto and Edo, later reprinted in Kyoto, Edo and Osaka. This was from the hand of Hasegawa Myōtei, who, after retiring from the palace, became a celebrated and prolific nyohitsu calligrapher producing 23 works across a publishing career that lasted sixty years from the turn of the eighteenth century, although her style, Myōtei-ryū, did not long outlive the person herself. These three volumes of letters apparently offer the opportunity to improve one’s handwriting through imitation and reproduction.

However, this paper will argue against such a highly limited characterisation of the work, positioning Sazareishi instead as a richly complex and highly rewarding text. Not only was Myōtei’s distinctive, flamboyant hand a pleasure to the eye, it also offered the classically educated an immersive, aesthetic, and yes, literary, engagement, where the material and literary text are inseparable in the construction of meaning. And yet, as a copybook, this was intended for calligraphy practice. The act of copying emerges as a materially-focussed mode of interacting with text that is at least equal to reading. Rather than thinking of copybooks as dry manuals, and women as driven by a need to better themselves, this paper proposes the copybook as a thing of leisure and pleasure, and, at least in its own time, an object of desire.