It is a fact increasingly acknowledged that although texts are important sources of insight and information, they can only tell part of the story. This is perhaps especially true when it comes to women's religious belief and practice. As Yuhang Li states at the very start of this wonderfully rich and illuminating study, her primary interest is what women “did” rather than what they wrote or, as is more often the case, what has been written about them. While she does not eschew texts entirely, her focus in Becoming Guanyin is on physical activities and material objects—dance, painting, embroidery, and ornamentation—created and used by women of the imperial period for religious purposes.
The Ming-Qing period, as is well known, saw a flourishing of so-called women's culture, aided and abetted by a booming market economy and major growth in publishing and book culture. This new appreciation for female “talent,” however, went...
