Empowered by Ancestors provides a narrative of how rituals for honoring ancestors were redesigned and reimagined during the Song period by scholars and the imperial court amid dynamic and contentious intellectual and political forces. The author, Cheung Hiu Yu, focuses on ritual discussions regarding the architecture of the imperial temple, which was the symbol of authority and legitimacy of the ruling house. Cheung highlights pivotal moments when controversies erupted over spatial arrangement, orthodoxy, and practice. Cheung's book shows the cyclical nature of how state consolidation of authority coincided with increased debates and production of textual records on state rituals. Cheung argues that by examining the roles played by scholars associated with New Learning (xinxue 新學) in the debates on imperial temple rituals, his book reveals a much more complex relationship between state-elite and state-society than had previously been known.
The book is divided into three sections comprising seven chapters....
