How is power connected to land? How do religions work in practice and not simply as ideological discourse? How can we today recover the lived history of how humans anywhere have done their first and most fundamental work—modifying the environment to provide sustenance? To scholars of premodern Japan, spoiled with an abundance of texts that imagine humanity apart from materiality, such questions are not so much food for thought as violently existential challenges. And yet the collected essays in Land, Power, and the Sacred: The Estate System in Medieval Japan attempt to answer these very questions. The estate (shōen) system has often been portrayed simplistically as the sum total of “private” landholdings in Japan. In Land, Power, and the Sacred, estates are not so much simple parcels of land but rather the framework facilitating a wide range of political, religious, and social activity connecting people of all...

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