Introduction
DURING THE SONG DYNASTY (960–1279), China experienced a flood of information. With this publishing boom, which created a new learning environment for medicine, a strategy for narrating empirical evidence and for substantiating knowledge claims gained salience in medical literature. We see one example of this strategy in Shen Kuo (1031–1095), a high-ranking civil official, who purportedly once brought a sick person back to life, even though he had never received expert medical training.1 Shen wrote that, while riding in a boat, he saw a boatman’s son who was so ill that he had lost consciousness and was seemingly on his last breath. Although Shen was not confident that he could treat the young man effectively, he did not have the heart to leave him to die. Shen hence generously shared his own pills with the suffering man—Rose- Storax Pills (Suhexiang Wan), medicines made using expensive and luxurious aromatics, such as agarwood and musk. After being administered four of the pills, the man regained consciousness and then recovered. Shen Kuo narrated this healing event in a medical treatise that he completed late in life, Good [Medical] Formulas (Liangfang). In Good Formulas, Shen appended a narrative of this healing event to the medical formula for the Rose-Storax Pill, which he included in the treatise as proof of its miraculous therapeutic efficacy.2 This case narrative, which illustrated Shen’s generosity to a dying stranger, additionally demonstrated his benevolence. Good Formulas soon circulated across Song China, and other Song authors often cited this treatise.
In the Song era, narratives based on authors’ personal experience (such as the abovementioned healing event) proliferated across medical literature as a strategy for enhancing the credibility and trustworthiness of a given treatise. Personal experience in the narratives encompassed authors’ medical cases, their encounters with the sick, their witness of and oral inquiry into others’ hands-on experience, and their observations of local medicinal substances. This empirical strategy had already appeared sporadically in medical treatises completed before Shen Kuo’s day, but it was not until the eleventh century that it figured prominently in medical literature.
How and why did the empirical strategy of documenting medical practices through personal experience rise to prominence in the Song period? That question is the focus of this book. Although I use the terms “empirical” and “experience” in a philosophical sense, the Western notion of experience had no counterpart in premodern Chinese narratives; for example, Chinese authors did not posit the existence of concepts and knowledge acquired independently from sensory perception. Nor did Chinese thinkers who narrated their personal experience as a strategy for substantiating knowledge mean to claim that sensory perception was the ultimate source of knowledge.3 The term “personal experience” is used here as shorthand for hands-on practices and sensory perception.
The term “empirical strategy” differentiates documentation through authors’ experience as a method of making knowledge claims from the use of authors’ experience as a source of knowledge itself. Hands-on experience has remained an essential source of medical knowledge. No one would doubt that an author’s healing practice and sensory perception in some way inform the knowledge recorded in his medical treatise. Of interest here are changes in the ways of narrating experiential knowledge in medical literature over time and how those changes suited the social and intellectual environment of the day.
The empirical strategy was one of many literary devices that authors deployed to enhance the credibility and reliability of their writings. These devices functioned as persuasion strategies. My concept of “persuasion strategies” is inspired by that of “literary technology,” which was developed by the historians of science Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer in their groundbreaking study of the competing ways through which scientific knowledge claims were legitimized in seventeenth-century Europe. They proposed the concept of literary technology in reference to literary practices through which phenomena produced by experiments with a new instrument of the time, the air pump, were made known to those who were not direct witnesses to its effects.4 Although the medical authors discussed throughout this book performed no technological experiments, the literary practices they conducted, such as the empirical strategy, function similarly as a means of convincing readers of the factuality of their medical accounts. Through the lens of those authors’ persuasion strategies, this book charts changes in competing ways of warranting medical knowledge claims in middle-period China, particularly between the ninth and twelfth centuries.5
PERSUASION STRATEGIES AND THE CHINESE MEDICAL HISTORY
In the history of Chinese medicine, the Song era has been marked by its government’s unprecedented involvement in medical affairs. It was in the Song dynasty that distributing medical texts to local officialdom and laymen became a significant means of “educating and transforming” (jiaohua) the public.6 The Song imperial government’s sponsorship of medical publishing began in the mid-tenth century, reaching its peak in the eleventh century, when it began printing an array of texts that had been completed before and during the Song era.
The dominant form of printing in imperial China was woodblock printing. This requires less expensive equipment and less capital, thus incorporating images more easily and cheaply than moveable-type printing, which was the preferred form of printing in early modern Europe, where its burdensome capital requirements entailed the centralization of printing centers.7
Woodblock printing technology in China had developed in the eighth century but was applied mainly to Buddhist texts. It was after the mid-tenth century, when the Song state was established, that the technology was first used for a wide range of written genres, including medical literature.8 This wider use made eleventh-century China the world’s first print culture.9 Coexisting with the spread of printing technology, earlier media used for publishing medical literature—hand-transcribed manuscripts (some posted in publicly accessible spaces) and stone inscriptions—continued to flourish, including via the imperial court. In addition to the court, various entities in the Song, including local government officials, degree holders of civil service examinations, physicians, and commercial publishers, printed medical texts. Several regions across China, including Henan, Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Sichuan, and Fujian, produced printed medical books in this era.10
While it coexisted with a still-vibrant manuscript culture, as mentioned above, the nascent print culture in the Song era reshaped cultural elites’ reading and writing practices, as well as their perception of mass communication.11 To capture this coexistence, in this book I use the terms “print” and “imprints” only when primary sources clearly indicate that a given text under discussion was printed. Otherwise, I use the term “publish” to refer to any means of distributing texts to the public. Later, in the sixteenth century, printed books, with their significantly lower prices, became the dominant media for transmitting the written word.12
The Song imperial court’s sponsorship of medical publications was unprecedented. On the one hand, in imperial China there were no institutional qualifications or controls regulating the writing and publishing of medical texts. Ostensibly, any literate and resourceful individual, even if he was not trained in medicine, could collect, compile, and circulate medical treatises to the public. On the other hand, oral transmission within families from one generation to the next or through master-disciple apprenticeships remained significant paths for transmitting medical knowledge. Such esoteric paths of transmission largely reflected the concept that the efficacy of medicine should be transmitted through ceremonies in which masters selected capable individuals and passed down healing knowledge and techniques to them.13
Beyond these narrow, circumscribed paths of transmission, there existed other publicly oriented pathways for transmitting medical knowledge. Archaeological excavations in recent decades show that in the Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE) some medical texts, in particular formulas, had already circulated among aristocrats and officials with no family backgrounds in medicine.14 The conspicuous expansion of imperial medical education in the Sui dynasty (581–619) marked the institutional recognition of and engagement with publicly available paths for transmitting medical knowledge.15 Such pathways decoupled the perceived efficacy of remedies and healing techniques from the specialized paths of transmission that seemed to confine medical knowledge to privileged lineages. The public means of transmission utilized in the Tang dynasty (618–907) extended along paths over which imperial officials posted or inscribed medical texts in publicly accessible spaces.16 In addition to officials, a growing number of scholarly elites and even some physicians during the transition from the Tang to the Song promoted the dissemination of medical texts as an important public benefit and accordingly published medical texts they collected, edited, or composed.
In the eleventh century, the Song court began printing doctrinal medical texts that had been completed during the Han dynasty. Its efforts stimulated the integration of theories derived from those Han doctrinal texts and healing practice in the Song era. This integration characterizes the Song era as one of three critical transitional periods in the history of medicine in China. These transitions comprise the crystallization of medical theories during the Han dynasty, the integration of doctrinal learning and healing practice under Song rule, and the impact of Western biomedicine since the nineteenth century—a formulation that has been adopted in English-language scholarship on Chinese medicine.17 Indebted to historians’ insights into innovations in Song medical policies, the present study explores how state policies changed persuasion strategies that medical authors deployed, a topic that has received little scholarly attention to date.
Persuasion strategies are useful for examining important turning points in the history of medicine in China. In addition to the empirical strategy, other types were used in medical literature in imperial China. A long-lasting one was citing authoritative sources, especially medical classics that were attributed to semidivine sages.18 This strategy appeared in the first century CE and continued to be used in later medical treatises, until the authority of classical Chinese medicine experienced a serious crisis in the early twentieth century. Another commonly used persuasion strategy involved asserting the “efficacy” (yan) of recorded therapies without specifying who had witnessed the successful outcomes. This appeared frequently in medical treatises composed between the fourth and tenth centuries. After the eleventh century, however, some Song authors, when applying the empirical strategy in their medical treatises, criticized earlier medical authors who did not use it as reckless and earlier medical treatises that did not deploy it as unreliable. Such criticism shows how the criteria by which some texts were judged to be more reliable than others changed over time.19 The rise of the empirical strategy thereby provides a window through which to view transformations in the construction of textual authority in middle-period China.
The development of and changes in persuasion strategies were intertwined with political-social transitions and epistemic cultures that evolved over centuries and across dynasties. Examining changes in persuasion strategies thus yields a new angle, from which to not only disclose long-term evolutions in Chinese medicine but also unveil relationships between those changes and contemporary epistemic cultures.
Although modern scholarship rarely investigates changes in persuasion strategies per se, their findings regarding the development of “medical case statements” (yi’an) in imperial China reveal empirical strategies of the time.20 The study of medical case narratives has not only opened an indispensable window through which to view key social and cultural transitions in China, but it has also become a fruitful site for generating comparative histories of medicine.21
Historians often trace medical case narratives back to a biography of an eminent physician, Chunyu Yi (fl. ca. 180–54 BCE). The biography was written by a later historian, Sima Qian (ca. 145?–86 BCE) and published in Records of the [Great] Historian (Shiji, ca. 90 BCE). According to this biography, an imperial decree commanded Chunyu to describe his successful prognoses and healing treatments. Chunyu respectfully replied that he always created “examination records” (zhenji) after each encounter with a patient.22 These records did not survive, but presumably they informed the twenty-five medical cases related in his biography.23 It is perhaps unsurprising that, like Chunyu Yi, many healing practitioners in ancient and imperial China, such as physicians and pharmacists, recorded their healing events for their own purposes and kept their records privately or, at most, circulated them on a limited basis within their families or medical lineages.
During the Song dynasty, a rapidly growing number of authors began to publish medical treatises that related narratives based on their personal experience. What separates those case narratives (such as Shen Kuo’s Good Formulas) from privately kept medical case records (such as Chunyu Yi’s) is that, for an author, publishing a medical text meant attending to a series of issues that are absent from private records. Those include presenting authors’ self-images effectively, devising persuasion strategies for selling knowledge claims, and convincing readers of the efficacy of healing practices and medicines. In other words, it was the intention to publish medical treaties that made claims to validity and authority important.
The sixteenth century witnessed the emergence of medical case statements as a new genre on their own. Two early examples are Sayings of a Female Doctor (Nüyi zayan, first printed in 1511), and Stone Mountain Medical Cases (Shishan yi’an, 1519). In the new genre, medical cases took up most of a text and often attributed cases to only a single healing practitioner. This new genre grew rapidly during the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1636–1911) dynasties, which together constitute the late imperial period. Working in this new genre in the late imperial era were physicians who documented and published compilations of their medical cases as supporting evidence of their virtuosity and of the efficacy of a given prescription style or medical “lineage of learning” to which they attached themselves. The production and proliferation of medical case compilations emerged in the context of the competitive healing market and the commercially prosperous book market in late imperial China.24 In the first half of the twentieth century—the early republican period—when competition between Chinese medicine and Western medicine intensified, Chinese physicians who pursued the standardization and professionalization of Chinese medicine began reconstructing and adapting the genre of medical case collections to the Western medical model of recording individual “disease cases” (bingan).25
Recent scholarship has noted that the development of the new “medical case statements” genre had interesting counterparts in Europe.26 Sixteenth-century Europe likewise witnessed the emergence of a distinct medical genre in which case collections became the main content of a text. That genre is known as observationes.27 Scholarship compares the yi’an genre with observationes in terms of, for instance, the format of the two genres, their association with pharmacological manuals, and “genre awareness” (authors’ clear awareness of the case narrative as a new form of medical writing).28 In contrast to the attention scholars have paid to this comparison, relatively few studies have compared medical case narratives in China with those in Europe before the sixteenth century. This book’s contextualized case study of the Song era will facilitate comparative studies of the case narratives in premodern Europe and China.
Deeply indebted to the rich accumulation of scholarship on histories of medical cases in imperial China, this book nevertheless diverges from existing research methodologies by encompassing both physicians’ and nonphysicians’ medical writings. When tracing medical cases in pre-sixteenth-century China, existing scholarship has predominantly observed physicians’ cases.29 With its focus on how physicians developed a tradition of thinking with cases, such scholarship finds only a handful of medical treatises in which Song physicians wrote and published their medical cases. By taking nonphysicians’ medical writings into account, we can see that Song civil officials, both in-service and retired, left ample records of medical cases in their medical treatises.
This book furthermore shifts attention from the late imperial period to the middle period. Previous studies have explored medical case collections as a new genre that began in the sixteenth century, tracing the origins of medical cases in earlier Chinese dynasties. For this retrospective research approach, medical cases discussed before the sixteenth century served as adjuncts to other forms of writing, and no existing compilation consisted of a single healing practitioner’s medical cases.30 But the Song dynasty was not merely an immature stage in the development of the new genre, lacking single-practitioner medical case compilations. Rather, this “lack” was a distinguishing feature of epistemic cultures during that period. Narrations of medical cases by multiple authors reveal important differences between features of epistemic cultures during the Song dynasty and those in the late imperial era with regard to the concepts and applications of empirical evidence.
EPISTEMIC CULTURES IN THE SONG ERA AND THE HISTORY OF KNOWLEDGE
The history of knowledge, as an extremely broad field, addresses the formulation, circulation, consumption, and application of knowledge, synthesizing multiple strands of scholarship, such as book history, publishing history, intellectual history, and sociology of knowledge.31 Of importance here are three significant and related changes in epistemic cultures under the Song that bore similarities to the rise of empirical strategies in medical texts during this period, which was both a product of and catalyst for those changes. Scholars have examined these developments predominantly by focusing on notebooks (biji, literally, “brush jottings”), travel literature, and “inventories of things” (pulu).32 The authors of such texts comprised primarily degree holders and bureaucrats, whose social groups overlapped with those of many Song medical authors who applied an empirical strategy.
The first change in the epistemic cultures of Song China was the increasing acceptance of knowledge obtained through hands-on experience as worthy of being learned and written down by the literati (primarily bureaucrats, examination degree holders, and scholar-gentlemen). Literati, or scholar-officials, generally referred to as ru, shi, and shidafu, had constituted the sociocultural elite since the Spring and Autumn Period (770–476 BCE), and maintained their dominant status in imperial Chinese society until the founding of the Republic in 1911. Over the course of these more than two thousand years, the defining composition of the literati changed several times. During the Tang dynasty, they were primarily hereditary clans that dominated political participation and social prestige. The aristocratic clans were weakened by and eventually disappeared over the turbulent course of events that began with the outbreak of Huang Chao’s Rebellion (874–84) and continued through the collapse of the Tang empire in 907 and the political fragmentation of the Five Dynasties in the north and the Ten Kingdoms in the south, eventually culminating in the reunification of China with the founding of the Song state in 960.
During the Song dynasty, the expansion of the civil service examination created a new political and cultural elite representing a wider range of social classes.33 Holding an examination degree or office, rather than representing a hereditary pedigree, became the core mark of the literati.34 Over the three-hundred-year span of the Song dynasty, the civil service examinations grew increasingly competitive, resulting in an ever-growing number of well-educated men who attempted but failed to pass them. Paralleling the soaring number of educated men without degrees, the central composition of the literati gradually expanded from degree- and office-holding figures to those who pursued scholarship and other socially beneficial achievements. The Song literati meanwhile pursued social eminence through various means, including examinations, landholding, commercial activities, and marriage.35
For the Song literati, Confucian classics, histories, and literary works remained essential subjects of “learning” (xue). Nonetheless, the soaring number of notebooks, travel literature, and inventories of things that circulated during this period reflected a change in what counted as knowledge in various fields, based on observing and investigating “objects/affairs” (wu), which came to occupy a prominent place in the literati’s intellectual world. These three types of texts—notebooks, travel literature, and inventories of things—together covered the breadth of extant subject matter. Travel literature in the Song encompassed sightseeing accounts, river diaries, and embassy accounts. Inventories of things presented authors’ connoisseurship of groups of specific objects, such as aromatics, flowers, crabs, coins, stones, and alcoholic drinks.
Among the three types of texts, biji (notebooks) is the most difficult to define. Modern scholars identify notebooks primarily according to their contents and the ways in which they present data. By this definition, notebooks cover a wide range of choices in subject matter, including medicine, geography, history, reading reflections, anecdotes of famous historical and contemporary figures, uncanny fantastic phenomena, ghost stories, and so forth. Notebooks present “entries” (or items, tiao) related to their subject matter in an item-to-item format without any obvious structure organizing them. These two features of notebooks—the wide breadth of topics and the nonstructural mixture of items—are reflected in words constituting the titles of many notebooks, such as “miscellany” (za) and “casualness” (sui and man).36 Despite these two features, modern scholars acknowledge difficulties in defining notebooks as a genre, because the item-by-item format can also be found in other types of works, such as inventories of things. Bibliographers since the Song dynasty have never reached consensus over the bibliographical category within which to fit “notebooks.” Song texts that modern scholars consider notebooks were classified into several bibliographical categories in imperial China, such as historiographies and “tales” (xiaoshuo).37 Reflecting the difficulty involved in defining the notebook genre, the number of extant notebooks produced during the Song era varies in modern scholars’ accounts, from 155 based on a narrow definition to 1,103 based on a broader one.38
The second change in Song epistemic culture was the growing presence and autonomy of individual authors. Many notebook authors articulated their critical reading and personal verification of the textual and oral information they received.39 A few literati in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries even claimed that Song authors’ verification in notebooks separated Song learning from that in previous ages.40 Song notebook authors verified received information in various ways, which included critically evaluating it, drawing on textual evidence, accounting for their witnessing of a phenomenon in question, inquiring into interlocutors whose sources of information the authors deemed trustworthy, and documenting informants’ backgrounds (such as who witnessed reported events, where, and when).41
A term that Song notebook authors frequently used to refer to these various methods of verifying information is “seeing and hearing” (jianwen, or conversely, “hearing and seeing” [wenjian]). The term “seeing and hearing” additionally appeared in travel literature and inventories of things. In these two types of works, “seeing and hearing” less frequently served as the evidential basis of authors’ statements that challenged or rectified information they had received. This term appears widely in the titles, paratexts, and contents of Song notebooks, in which “seeing and hearing” was a broad term and could designate one or multiple methods of acquiring knowledge. Depending on the narrative context, the methods involved could include either seeing and hearing in a narrow sense or broader hands-on experience or document reading, or even all of the above. When used as an indication of knowledge acquisition in Song notebooks, the epistemological focus of the term “seeing and hearing” lies in accentuating “the presence of an individual seeker with epistemic autonomy.”42
The third change in epistemic culture during the Song involved the increasing intellectual value of the reliability of a given text. The various methods by which Song notebook authors verified received information often promoted the reliability of their notebooks. A growing body of scholarship has characterized reliability as a crucial concern of Song notebook authors. In this scholarship the term “reliability” refers to methods through which notebook authors acquired knowledge that they considered grounded. It also indicated their assurances of the trustworthiness of the information sources on which their notebooks were based, as well as their emphasis on the historical factuality of events they reported.43
The foregoing three changes in Song epistemic cultures can all be found in medical treatises that were completed in the Song era. The authors of many Song medical treatises accounted for the knowledge they acquired primarily through hands-on experience, stressing their critical reading and personal verification of the texts they had read and seeking to prove the reliability of their treatises. A close intertextual dialogue existed between medical writings and notebooks during this period. Medical authors and notebook authors often cited and commented on each other’s opinions regarding healing affairs. This intertextual dialogue renders the investigation into the foregoing three changes in medical literature indispensable to our understanding of transitions in epistemic cultures in Song China.
Examination of medical literature adds new dimensions to our understanding of the abovementioned changes in Song epistemic cultures and enriches common chronologies of those changes. Historians have concentrated on the development of the three changes in Song China between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. This book is going to trace these changes back as early as the late ninth century—the late Tang period—revealing the continuity in epistemic cultures between the late Tang and the Song, one that has hitherto been explored only minimally.
The prominence of the empirical strategy in medical texts provides particularly effective sources, enabling us to observe the dynamics and tensions between new and conventionally accepted persuasion strategies. Such dynamics and tensions are difficult to analyze in reference to notebooks, because notebooks represent fields of knowledge so divergent that they belonged to no specific genre or knowledge domain and adopted no conventionally agreed-on strategies. In contrast, medical literature developed over a long span of time, beginning at least in the third century BCE, and in the Song era, medical authors deployed the recognized authority of texts and already established persuasion strategies. Song medical literature offers historians rich accounts with which to probe how a new persuasion strategy was introduced into a specific genre, gaining prominence over conventional strategies in that genre. Examining the empirical strategy in Song medical literature thus enables readers to achieve a broader and richer understanding of changes in epistemic cultures in that period.
SOURCES, METHODOLOGY, AND STRUCTURE
This study works mainly with Song notebooks and medical literature. The medical literature I examine consists of texts that would be classified in the bibliographic category that is closest to our present-day understanding of “medicine.” The criteria by which texts are counted as “medical literature” has developed and changed over time. In early China, in the bibliographic treatise included in History of the [Former] Han (Han shu, completed in the first century), the category is called “remedies and techniques” (fangji). This category collects four groups of books: “medical canons” (yijing), “canonical remedies” (jingfang), “bedchamber instructions” (fangzhong), and “methods of becoming immortals” (shenxian).44 From the first century to the Song era, the title of the general category shifted from “remedies and techniques” to phrases explicitly bearing the term “medicine” (yi), and includes words such as “healing methods” (yifang) and “medical books” (yishu).45 Over this longue durée, bibliographers gradually removed many texts previously classified under “bedchamber instructions” and “methods of becoming immortals” from the bibliographic category of medicine. In the Song, two main subcategories constituted the medicine rubric (yifang or yishu): formularies (fangshu, literally, “books of methods,” collections of remedies) and the literature of materia medica (bencao, literally, “rooted in herbs,” collections of introductions to medicinal substances and instructions for their preparation and use). These two subcategories form the primary sources for this book.
Printing technology began to be used to publish writing in medical genres in the Song era, so surviving medical texts from that period outnumber those from earlier ones in Chinese history by a wide margin. The significant number of Song texts that have survived renders that dynasty the first that enabled scholars to chart changes in persuasion strategies in medical literature in meaningful ways. In addition to referencing the medical literature, in order to indicate similar developments in authors’ epistemic autonomy and the value of reliability between medical texts and notebooks, I draw extensively on notebooks produced by Tang and Song figures.
When authors of Song medical texts narrated from personal experience as an empirical strategy, they did not rank their own experience above that of their acquaintances—the evidential value of secondhand experience was treated as equivalent to firsthand. When introducing either their experience, their acquaintances’, or both, those authors for the most part used the same phrases: “seeing and hearing” (jianwen), “explanatory historical context” (benshi), and “facts” (shishi). The blurred boundary between experience and the absence of a clear evidential hierarchy indicates a remarkable difference between the empirical strategy and our present-day clear-cut division between firsthand and secondhand experience. The epistemological focus of these terms is not to distinguish firsthand from secondhand experience but to emphasize authors’ epistemic autonomy in light of the sheer volume of medical texts circulated during the Song dynasty.
Although Song medical authors did not coin a particular term to refer specifically to their firsthand experience, their empirical strategy can nevertheless be examined historically. Study of Shen Kuo’s notebook has shown that we can observe the Song notebook authors’ empirical approaches via a close reading of the rich descriptions of their epistemic praxis that they left in their oeuvres.46 Along the same vein, the Song medical authors’ stress on the empirical strategy can be inferred from their explanations for using the strategy and also by the rich narratives they built based on personal experience.47
This book consists of four main chapters that focus on four political-social- intellectual contexts in which authors of Song medical texts came to consciously deploy the empirical strategy. Although these chapters cover a period that runs from the fifth into the thirteenth centuries, they focus primarily on changes that occurred between the late ninth and twelfth centuries (the late Tang and Song dynasties). The chapters are sequenced chronologically according to the completion dates of the principal medical treatises scrutinized in each chapter. This arrangement will help us see the chronological development of the empirical strategy in middle-period China.
On the pages that follow, we will see that the prominence of the empirical strategy intersected intimately and consequentially not only with an increasingly distinctive stress on the reliability of a work and on the author’s verification and epistemic autonomy but also with a new learning environment that grew out of the medical publishing boom of the Song era. This integration of three fields—the histories of medicine, knowledge, and publishing—through the thread of persuasion strategies compels us to appreciate the production and publication of medical literature as an integral part of the Song literati’s epistemic culture. More broadly, this investigation introduces important new perspectives on differences between middle and late imperial epistemic cultures.