Nissan Seminar: Scandals, Secrets and News: How Manuscripts Reshape Our Knowledge of Edo Culture (Professor Peter Kornicki, Cambridge)

Convener(s): Professor Hugh Whittaker and Professor Kristi Govella

For far too long now the Edo period has been pigeonholed as a ‘print culture’. It is time to explode this myth, and Professor Kornicki will do so by exploring some of the huge quantity of manuscript books that circulated in the Edo period. Sceptical? Well, consider why it is that so many printed books survive in only one copy or in no copies at all, while many manuscript books survive in hundreds of copies. And consider why so many collections of books private and public contain so many manuscript books. It was not just the poor who turned to manuscripts but also the wealthy and the sophisticated: in fact, you could not be a well-read man or woman without resorting to manuscripts. In some ways this phenomenon reminds us of the circulation of poetic manuscripts in 17th-century England or of clandestine political texts in pre-revolutionary France, but it was on a much bigger scale in Japan. Some of the manuscripts that form part of Professor Kornicki’s own collection will be available for inspection prior to being donated to the Bodleian Library.

Peter Kornicki studied at Lincoln College and then St Antony’s College and subsequently taught at the University of Tasmania and Kyoto University before moving to Cambridge in 1985. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2000 and retired as Professor of Japanese in 2014. In 2024 he was Hanna Holborn Gray Visiting Professor in Paleography and the History of the Book at the University of Chicago. His most recent publications are Languages, scripts, and Chinese texts in East Asia (2018), Eavesdropping on the Emperor: Interrogators and Codebreakers in Britain’s War with Japan (2021), Printing technologies and book production in 17th-century Japan (2025) and Soto kara mita Edo jidai no shoseki bunka: shahon, hanpon, zaigai shoseki (2025).