Prologue
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Rise of the Administrative Nobility
Chapter 2: Kitabatake Chikafusa and the Unveiling of Court
Secrets
Chapter 3: The Master of Ritual
Chapter 4: The Destruction of Precedent
Chapter 5: Creating Court and Sovereign
Chapter 6: The End of the Past
Chapter 7: The Ashikaga Emperor
Epilogue: The Unraveling
Glossary
Bibliography
Thomas Conlan is a graduate of Stanford University and the University of Michigan, specializing in premodern Japanese history, and has taught at Bowdoin College since 1998. He has spent considerable time in Japan, where he studied at Kyoto University, and has written widely about warfare in Japan and the 1274 and 1281 Mongol Invasions.
"Thomas Conlan greatly advances our understanding of the most
intractable, understudied, yet pivotal century of Japanese history.
His book is a multi-pronged study of warfare and Shingon ritual,
both of which--after evolving over several centuries--came to play
a crucial role in the legitimacy crisis of imperial rule, as two
fourteenth-century emperors fought over the throne."
-- Herman Ooms, Author of Imperial Politics and Symbolics in
Ancient Japan: The Tenmu Dynasty, 650-800
"Thomas Conlan, a historian specializing in fourteenth-century
Japan, has written of the military events and developments of that
tumultuous age. In From Sovereign to Symbol he turns his attention
to the great dynastic conflict of the fourteenth century that rent
the imperial family, producing two emperors and two courts. In a
fascinating and persuasive new approach to the period, Conlan
contends that masters of the rituals of Shingon Buddhism
directed the course of rulership that led eventually to the
establishment of Yoshimitsu, head of the Ashikaga warrior house, as
a virtual emperor.
-- H. Paul Varley, professor emeritus at Columbia University and
Sen Soshitsu XV Professor of Japanese Cultural History at the
University of Hawaii
"Japan in the fourteenth century experienced profound social and
political upheaval brought about by six decades of civil warfare,
conducted in the name of two competing royal lineages. Thomas
Conlan adopts an innovative approach toward this tumultuous era,
highlighting the role, not of warrior power, but of influential
courtier-monks who deployed their mastery of ritual and symbolics
in new strategies of legitimation that reshaped the medieval
Japanese polity.
Based on extensive examination of little known documents, this
exciting study will be welcomed by all readers interested in
religious constructions of political authority in pre-modern Japan
and their
influence on modern imperial discourse."
-- Jacqueline Stone, Professor of Japanese Religions, Princeton
University
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