The Traditions of Exemplary Women (Lienu huan)

FAIN: RZ-50105-03

University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA 22903-4833)
Anne B. Kinney (Project Director: September 2002 to July 2005)
Daniel V. Pitti (Project Director: July 2005 to March 2007)

A translation of the ancient (c. 78 B.C.) Chinese text Traditions of Exemplary Women and a bilingual-multimedia internet resource for scholarly inquiry into representations of women in ancient China. (36 months)

The Traditions of Exemplary Women consists of biographical accounts of female role models in early China and is the earliest extant book in the Chinese tradition solely devoted to the moral education of women. It became the standard textbook for women's education for over two millennia. Our project is a collaborative effort to publish electronically both a digital translation and bilingual-multimedia resource for scholarly inquiry into the complex relationship between representations of women in early China and the cultural forces that shaped them. As a resource for discovering new relationships between texts, geography, genealogies, images, and themes, the project will help redefine the boundaries of humanistic research in this field and potentially transform the way sinologists translate and annotate texts, ask questions, and engage in research. By making all of its resources bilingual, the project also promises to open up the culture of early China to scholars who know no Chinese.