Old Scripts, New Actors: European Encounters with Chinese Writing, 1550-1700 *
EASTM 26 (2007): 68-116 Old Scripts, New Actors: European Encounters with Chinese Writing, 1550-1700 * Bruce Rusk [Bruce Rusk is Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. From 2004 to 2006 he was Mellon Humani- ties Fellow in the Asian Languages Department at Stanford University. His dis- sertation was entitled “The Rogue Classicist: Feng Fang and his Forgeries” (UCLA, 2004) and his article “Not Written in Stone: Ming Readers of the Great Learning and the Impact of Forgery” appeared in The Harvard Journal of Asi- atic Studies 66.1 (June 2006).] * * * But if a savage or a moon-man came And found a page, a furrowed runic field, And curiously studied line and frame: How strange would be the world that they revealed. A magic gallery of oddities. He would see A and B as man and beast, As moving tongues or arms or legs or eyes, Now slow, now rushing, all constraint released, Like prints of ravens’ feet upon the snow. — Herman Hesse 1 Visitors to the Far East from early modern Europe reported many marvels, among them a writing system unlike any familiar alphabetic script. That the in- habitants of Cathay “in a single character make several letters that comprise one * My thanks to all those who provided feedback on previous versions of this paper, especially the workshop commentator, Anthony Grafton, and Liam Brockey, Benjamin Elman, and Martin Heijdra as well as to the Humanities Fellows at Stanford. I thank the two anonymous readers, whose thoughtful comments were invaluable in the revision of this essay.
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