Title: Recasting antiquity
Description: This dissertation examines the ways in which the rediscovery of ancient bronzes in the eleventh century changed the ritual hermeneutics of the Northern Song dynasty. In particular, it considers the impact of bronzes on the interpretive strategies used to reconstruct the ceremonial paraphernalia--the vessels, vestments, and vehicles--named in the Book of Ceremony and Rites ( Yili ), the Rites of Zhou ( Zhouli ), and the Record of Rites ( Liji ). Because these classic texts had for centuries been esteemed as guidelines for appropriate imperial and aristocratic conduct, generations of exegetes had endeavored to determine the proper shape and substance of the implements named within. When eleventh century scholars began to decipher the inscriptions on ancient bronzes, they realized that many of them were actual remnants of the very ceremonies that these ritual classics purportedly recorded. Yet the bronzes looked quite different from ceremonial implements reconstructed by earlier exegetes. This discrepancy set off a crisis of confidence in the capacity of existing hermeneutics to reliably recover the normative models of antiquity. The present study explores some of the ways in which Northern Song emperors and literati dealt with that crisis.

By approaching the Song rediscovery of ancient bronzes as a catalyst for new intellectual problematics, this dissertation also draws into question modern attempts to collectively situate Song discourses on bronzes under rubrics such as antiquarianism or archaeology. These rubrics, I argue, are anachronistic, in that they suggest a coherent set of concerns and commonality of purpose that is not evidenced in the actual writings of the Song figures in question. By focusing on the arguments internal to the historical texts themselves, rather than the agendas of the later fields that adopted these texts as intellectual forebears, I attempt to narrate a more nuanced story of the various ways in which ancient bronzes informed Song intellectual life.