Christina Laffin
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780824835651
- eISBN:
- 9780824871215
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824835651.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, Asian History
This epilogue considers Abutsu's legacy and how her works have been read and reinterpreted over the past seven and a half centuries. Abutsu's guide to court life was widely circulated during her own ...
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This epilogue considers Abutsu's legacy and how her works have been read and reinterpreted over the past seven and a half centuries. Abutsu's guide to court life was widely circulated during her own lifetime and later annotated by the scholars of early modern Japan for their daughters. In the seventeenth century, she was hailed as one of the three greatest travel writers by the poet Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, her works were included in didactic compendia for women as the products of a loyal wife. Centuries later, during World War II, Abutsu's advice manual and travel diary were cited by educators as representing her iconic role as the perfect embodiment of a chaste woman (teijo) and mother or, as one male scholar wrote, the “crystallization of motherhood” (bosei no kesshō).Less
This epilogue considers Abutsu's legacy and how her works have been read and reinterpreted over the past seven and a half centuries. Abutsu's guide to court life was widely circulated during her own lifetime and later annotated by the scholars of early modern Japan for their daughters. In the seventeenth century, she was hailed as one of the three greatest travel writers by the poet Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, her works were included in didactic compendia for women as the products of a loyal wife. Centuries later, during World War II, Abutsu's advice manual and travel diary were cited by educators as representing her iconic role as the perfect embodiment of a chaste woman (teijo) and mother or, as one male scholar wrote, the “crystallization of motherhood” (bosei no kesshō).
