This book presents itself as a “systematic study” (p. 1) of the Zuozhuan, “a heterogeneous and layered text that took shape over a long period of accretion” (p. 29) and is accepted by the author as deriving from around 400 bce (p. 33). Two terms used in the title are essential to the book's project. One is “the past,” in the sense of events that occurred earlier than some reference point, which would appear to be unproblematic and has an early Chinese counterpart, gu. The second term is “historiography,” which seems to be taken in both a straightforward sense of writing about history (hence implying a straightforward sense for the term “readability” in the book's title), and also a larger meta-sense of writing about the writing of history, which hints at a larger meaning for “readability.” Neither sense of “historiography” has an obvious early Chinese counterpart.
A third term,...
