Scholarship on women in imperial China has blossomed in the last several decades. It was time for someone to write a student-friendly account of the current state of the field. Bret Hinsch has done this in a multivolume series, with individual texts suitable for classroom use. The Ming and Qing dynasty volumes are under review here.
There is much to praise about the volumes. They are imaginatively organized (by themes), they are accessibly written, and they draw deeply on both Chinese and Western scholarship. (Hinsch's own scholarship is on earlier periods, so he draws productively on the scholarship of others.) The tone is a bit like a well-written textbook. Because of the breadth of the topic and the brevity of the work, the text often tantalizes rather than satisfies. This is not altogether a bad thing in a book designed for student use. The text is (in most, though not...
