Jessey J. C. Choo's Inscribing Death masterfully reconstructs the Tang culture of remembrance and medieval burial practices through a critical examination of passages culled from ancient and medieval ritual works and the thousands of received and recovered muzhiming 墓誌銘 (entombed epitaph inscriptions) that have only been widely available to sinologists since the turn of the millennium. While the first English-language monograph to study the rise and development of early medieval (200–600 CE) entombed epitaphs was Timothy M. Davis's extremely informative Entombed Epigraphy and Commemorative Culture in Early Medieval China,1 Choo's book is not a history of muzhiming but rather a “bottom up” (22) study featuring the voices still heard in the inscriptions. These individual voices are brought into conversation with precedents outlined in the ancient and medieval classics to reconstruct the development of several new medieval Chinese burial practices, the debates and problems they caused, and the ways...

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