RECONFIGURING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE STATE AND LITERATI

For the first 150 years of the Chosŏn period, scholars turned their Confucian knowledge into sociopolitical power and participated in the state political discourse mainly through entering officialdom after passing the civil service examinations. Although this career path had guaranteed political prestige and social privileges throughout the dynasty, rural scholars began to develop a new strategy around 1550, after the tumultuous contention among various scholar groups in Chosŏn court politics from the late fifteenth to the middle of the sixteenth century. The political turmoil can in part be attributed to the literati’s different perspectives on how to apply the interpretations of Neo-Confucianism to real politics. Most court ministers, who had established their authority by supporting several early Chosŏn kings who had ascended the throne in illegitimate ways, regarded Neo-Confucianism simply as a tool for efficient statecraft. Meanwhile, sarim,¹ who had entered officialdom by virtue of their prominent scholarship and high moral standards, called for the immediate realization of Neo-Confucian moral principles in politics. These different standpoints elevated tension in court and culminated in a series of four literati purges (sahwa) from 1498 to 1545 in which many sarim scholars were torpedoed.²

The most notable change in the lifestyle of rural scholars in this period came with T’oegye’s local academy movement in the Yŏngnam area in southeastern Korea, launched in 1549;³ Chu Sebung (1495–1554) had first established the institution in 1543.⁴ Both of them lamented the degradation of the state educational system and justified new academies as the bastion of Neo-Confucian morality and knowledge. Focusing on the turbulent political unrest in this period, some studies explain T’oegye’s academy movement as his reaction to the literati purges. For example, the unstable political conditions threatening T’oegye’s position during the last literati purge in 1545 were ascribed to his attention to the local academies.⁵ This implies that local academies became refuges that allowed sarim scholars to remain distant from the state while devoting themselves to Neo-Confucian studies. Another explanation highlights the rise of local academies as the reaction of sarim scholars, devising an alternative way to engage in court politics rather than cutting their connection to the central government. This interpretation explains the local academy movement as sarim scholars’ strategy to enhance their political sway in rural society, based upon which they connected themselves to political factions in the central government. Local academies were “the offspring of literati purges and progenitors of factionalism.”⁶ In this understanding, the political activism of academy scholars simply added local support to the preexisting political institutions of the central government. Irrespective of their different interpretations of state-literati relations, these studies suggest that local academies triggered changes in the political participation of educated elites. While stressing the centrality of court politics and its impact upon the literati’s political stance, however, these studies reduce the autonomous activism of rural scholars, in which the academy network played a crucial role by both fostering their group consciousness and facilitating communication, to a reactive appendage to the political discourse of the capital.

It is true that the Chosŏn state attempted to bring nonofficial scholars under its control from the beginning of the dynasty. The central government had invested in the state school system and institutionalized the civil service examination to fill offices with those who were well versed in Confucian doctrine, which the state promoted not only as the social norm but also as the effective means of statecraft.⁷ Hence, in theory, the state version of Confucian knowledge was supposed to trickle down to the whole society. The Chosŏn state, however, had never successfully dominated in defining the meanings of the Confucian classics and setting the social functions of educated elites.⁸ The diplomatic tension with the early Ming court forced Korean scholars to painstakingly figure out the Neo-Confucian metaphysical concepts without tutelage from China. Thus, the state could not help but tolerate various interpretations of the social and political functions of Confucianism presented by different scholar groups. Moreover, the state school system began to decline from the early sixteenth century, partly because commoners began to enroll in local state schools to evade military duties.⁹ Rural elites welcomed the newly established local academies as an alternative school system only for themselves. The academies incrementally increased, particularly during the seventeenth century, to about seven hundred by the end of the Chosŏn dynasty.¹⁰ Combined with the divergence in interpretations of Confucian knowledge, the exponential increase of local academies shook Confucian literati loose from state supervision during the late Chosŏn period.

The slackening of state domination also coincided with increasing tension over economic resources between the metropolitan elites holding government positions and local elites in the countryside. The sarim scholar group prospered particularly in the Yŏngnam area, partly due to the economic stability of the region, which fostered the political independence of Yŏngnam scholars from the state. Yŏngnam Confucian literati, most of whom were small and midsize landlords, had nothing to lose, at least from an economic perspective, by staying away from the state-led political program; their economic independence was secured by the advanced agricultural technology of the region.¹¹ In the same vein, the various local Confucian projects developed in the Yŏngnam area in the early sixteenth century, such as community compacts (hyangyak) and local drinking and shooting ceremonies (hyangŭmjurye; hyangsarye), exhibit the attempts of local Confucian elites to institutionalize their dominance over the local economy. The local elites’ assertion of autonomy in their hometowns conflicted with the political centralization backed by the already established court ministers and their pursuit of domination over local resources.¹² In fact, the Chosŏn bureaucrats were at once large landlords and landowners who systematically endeavored to free their lands from the tax collectors.¹³ In order to gain the upper hand in local politics, these metropolitan elites collectively established liaison offices in the capital (kyŏngjaeso), through which they took control of the magistrates and elites of the regions where their lands were located. In this claim, sarim scholars suffered four literati purges because they were in competition with metropolitan elites over local resources.¹⁴ The proliferation of local academies at the turn of the seventeenth century, thus, took place in the context of the abolition of the capital liaison offices in 1603.¹⁵ The rise of local academies evinces the institutional attempt of countryside literati to create political independence and secure economic autonomy in their hometowns. If we focus on the competition for surplus agricultural production, conflict between the bureaucrats in the capital and rural elites was inevitable.

These important studies of the social, economic, and political conditions of the early Chosŏn period, however, do not fully explain how the multidirectional interactions between the state and the scholarly community formed around local academies. If the academy movement was meant to distance local scholar groups from factionalism-ridden court politics, and the contention between the high-ranking bureaucrats and local elites had resulted from competition over local resources, it would have made more sense for rural scholars to strive to secure their socioeconomic interests locally rather than raising their voices on national political issues through academy networks, which generally did not have direct repercussions for their local leadership and material interests. The local academy movement itself would have been unnecessary if Confucian elites in rural societies had lost interest in state politics and instead bolstered their sociopolitical independence and protected their economic autonomy. Likewise, if the academy movement reinforced the existing court politics through connections with factions in the central government, there would not have been such tension between metropolitan elites and academy scholars throughout the late Chosŏn period.

Refusing both complete independence from and the reinforcement of the preexisting political system, the early advocates of the academy movement were devising a new system of interaction with the central government. Despite the emphasis on autonomy in curriculum and scholarly activities, the early founders could not help relying on financial support and official endorsement from the state. For instance, the letter that T’oegye sent to the governor of Kyŏngsang in 1549 gives a good sense of how he envisioned the functions of local academies. In this letter T’oegye meticulously enumerated the educational advantages of the academies over local state schools, which, he claimed, had lost their educational function due to their enormous emphasis on preparation for the civil service examinations. He also requested the court to confer a royal charter on Paegundong Academy;¹⁶ the court chartered the institution as Sosu Academy the following year.¹⁷ In fact, it became a convention that the court granted royal charters to major academies throughout the late Chosŏn period, which also brought practical benefits such as tax breaks and exemption from military and corvée duties to academy scholars and staff.¹⁸ In this way, the relationship between the central government and local academies began in collaborative symbiosis rather than antagonistic conflict. T’oegye seems to have intended to gain quasi-official status for local academies through relating them to the state educational programs instead of completely sequestering them from state influence. Likewise, the Chosŏn court must have offered financial support and official recognition to academies in the expectation of effective control over the rural societies through the leadership of academy scholars, who would function as intermediaries between the state authority and the rural population. Academy scholars could have been expected to deliver and reinforce the state moral directives to the local community.¹⁹ This situation, at a glance, gives the impression that academy scholars played the role of mouthpieces for the state in rural areas. However, academy scholars appropriated this new social institution to boost their influence not only in local societies but also in the national political arena.

As discussed so far, the academy movement brought about complex interactions between the state and rural literati, in which the literati were neither completely separate from nor subordinate to the state. Tetsuo Najita’s study of Kaitokudō Academy in Tokugawa Japan demonstrates that academy scholars could maintain the horizontal and communal inner life through the legitimation that they gained from the vertical political channels.²⁰ While Najita’s point is partly applicable in explaining the political propensity of Chosŏn literati, local academies in Korea further hybridized horizontal and vertical political processes. In fact, the development of the horizontal academy network resulted in a directional shift in vertical political influence from the local scholarly community to the court, adding to the extant system in which the political agenda from the royal court spread to the rest of the social sectors. The political empowerment of the rural scholarly community through new local programs neither denied the existing system by creating a completely autonomous and independent political group nor confirmed it by supporting the monarch or court ministers. These scholars rather promiscuously shuffled their collaboration with and antagonism toward existing political actors under disparate considerations, according to their own self-interest. These complex interactions among the monarch, bureaucrats, and local scholars generated the main dynamics of the Chosŏn political culture.

The partnership between the state and the elites, observed in both late imperial China and Chosŏn Korea, did not generate a public sphere completely separate from the state.²¹ In fact, the state emerged as a key player, creating and managing political information and news by persistently negotiating and collaborating with educated elites. Therefore, Habermas’s model of a public sphere as the counterpart to state power does not apply to the Confucian polities of early modern East Asia.²² His bourgeois conception of the public sphere is not perfect after all, because the expansion of the public’s discursive authority would not only make the people the state in theory but also threaten the autonomy of public opinion as a critical discursive check on the state.²³ Likewise, in Tokugawa Japan, academy scholars of disparate stations and philosophies debated and criticized virtually all issues about the polity. In this regard, the academies are the sharpest evidence of a “public sphere of opinion” in early modern Japan.²⁴ Although the bourgeois public sphere of western Europe is not the same as the “public sphere” developed in Chosŏn academies, the latter nevertheless showed the formation and expression of opinions, as in the case of Tokugawa Japan.²⁵ The rural literati of Korea chose a radical lifestyle, devoting themselves to scholarly activities and social interactions in local academies; this new way of life generated a peculiar link between the state and educated elites as both collaborators and antagonists.

THE EXPANSION OF EPISTOLARY SPACE IN THE ACADEMY MOVEMENT

The new relationship between the state and rural literati could emerge in part because academy scholars creatively used letter writing for both communicative and noncommunicative purposes. T’oegye’s networking process while leading the academy movement caused a dramatic increase of correspondence in addition to the scholarly application of letters. As seen in table 4.1, T’oegye’s correspondence abruptly surged starting in the late 1540s, and this change is more noticeable in his correspondence with nonfamily members. The dearth of correspondence before this period does not necessarily mean that T’oegye seldom sent and received letters. However, we need to consider the possible reasons the volume of letters increased, particularly those exchanged beyond the family. The rise in T’oegye’s correspondence coincided with his anthologization of Zhu Xi’s letters in the 1550s and his involvement in the Four-Seven Debate from 1559 to 1566. Moreover, the formation of interregional scholarly networks through the local academy movement elevated the significance of letter writing as an effective communicative tool. The meticulous inclusion of letters in the collection of T’oegye’s writings shows that both T’oegye himself and the compilers of the collection realized the importance of this genre. The major academic, social, and political changes in late sixteenth-century Korea converged in letter writing—a practice too mundane to attract special attention. Local scholars who joined T’oegye’s academy movement formed a new “interpretive community,” to borrow Stanley Fish’s term, whose strategy of reading letters was refashioned to deliver social meanings different from their communicative functions.²⁶ Now letters not only facilitated communication among members of new academy networks but also constituted the core reading materials for Neo-Confucian studies. Only letters, not writings in other genres, could buttress the ideological basis of these academies as the authentic centers of Neo-Confucian scholarship. The extensive usage of letters cohesively integrated the human and discursive networks of the Chosŏn scholarly community. In other words, T’oegye and the scholars under his influence underscored the genre of letters as the most suitable textual means articulating their ideology, and it was also the written mode by which they could stay connected and rally together.

T’oegye and his collaborators relied on exchanges of letters to iron out diverse problems that emerged in the local academy movement. In particular, the epistolary discussions were instrumental in resolving contention over the selection of past Confucian worthies. Rituals commemorating them were one of two central functions of academies, along with educating rural scholars, and figured prominently in shaping the scholars’ identity. The intergenerational connection created in ritual practices allowed academy scholars to historicize their ideas and interactions, and the regular performance of rituals promoted among participants a sense of membership in the same community.²⁷ This significance of rituals even influenced the architectural layout of academies. Unlike local state schools, where shrines were generally located behind lecture halls, the local academies placed their shrines to the east of the lecture hall to reflect Zhu Xi’s Family Rituals.²⁸ Rural literati attempted to perform academy rituals in the correct spatial protocol as given in the Confucian classics so that they could claim their difference from and superiority to the state authority. When Chosŏn scholars deepened their understanding of Confucian rituals in the seventeenth century, they rigidly adhered to the ancient protocol by placing shrines in the front part of the academy complex and the lecture halls and dormitories in the back (myoch’imje). With this architectural embodiment of Neo-Confucian ritual formality, local academies represented the exclusive space for orthodox learning.²⁹ Rituals for past Confucian worthies and shrines built for them made academies the “mnemonic architecture” that embodied historical memory.³⁰

The symbolic gravity of the academy rituals drew diverse social actors into the process of deciding who would be enshrined, including the descendants of enshrined figures, local elites, and the state authorities. Contention frequently erupted over ritual issues, with heated debates through both face-to-face meetings and extensive exchanges of letters. T’oegye’s followers who were local magistrates led the early phase of the academy movement. Their collaboration with T’oegye reveals how contentious the ritual issues could be. Hwang Chunnyang was one of the major collaborators, and his career as a local magistrate allowed him to provide official resources needed for T’oegye’s agenda. When Hwang was appointed magistrate of Sŏngju in 1560, his predecessor, No Kyŏngnin (1516–1568), had already established Yŏngbong Academy. However, it did not easily take root in the scholarly culture of Sŏngju owing to the debates over the enshrinement of past worthies.³¹

Correspondence among T’oegye, Hwang Chunnyang, and No Kyŏngnin demonstrates that all parties involved in this debate considered it a matter of identity building. Since Hwang had begun to involve himself in the affairs of Yŏngbong Academy, he had expressed his disagreement with No’s attempt to enshrine Yi Chonyŏn (1269–1343) and his grandson Yi Inbok (1308–1374) there; the men were from Sŏngju and had outstanding merit as loyal court ministers during the Koryŏ dynasty. No had built a shrine for the two Yis nearby, and he wanted to merge the shrine with the academy. Although Hwang admitted that the two Yis should be honored as local worthies, he made it clear, in his reply to No, that local worthies praised for their merits in officialdom were not qualified to be enshrined in the academy. Those to be enshrined should “inherit [the scholarly tradition of] Confucian sages and illuminate younger scholars [with their moral virtues and lofty scholarship].”³² He further argued that “the two Yis belong to the category of local worthies who should be enshrined in local shrines; thus, it is correct to build another shrine for them.”³³ The problem lay in the proximity of Yŏngbong Academy and the shrine. This, Hwang argued, forced academy slaves to work to maintain the shrine. More seriously, he claimed, it would be unavoidable that academy scholars would see ritual services for the two Yis occurring in the shrine right next to their academy, and it would be difficult for them to ignore the activities.³⁴ T’oegye supported Hwang’s argument in his reply to No’s letter requesting that T’oegye write a record of Yŏngbong Academy. He pointed out that Yi Chonyŏn, in his portrait, holds Buddhist beads in his hand. T’oegye argued that enshrining a figure with a penchant for Buddhism in the academy would not be the right way to offer Neo-Confucian exemplars for local scholars. T’oegye asserted that enshrinement in local academies was designed to foster the Neo-Confucian Way.³⁵

Hwang suggested that No enshrine Kim Koengp’il (1454–1504) instead of the two Yis; he of course fit the standard of “Confucian worthy,” and in addition, his wife was from Sŏngju and his descendants were still living there. Hwang asked No to discuss this possibility with the Sŏngju scholars,³⁶ and they welcomed Kim as an ideal figure to enshrine. No, however, attempted to enshrine Kim together with the two Yis rather than alone. Now the point of debate shifted to the order of seats for ritual tablets among these three worthies in the same shrine. T’oegye’s reply to No on this issue illustrates the crux of this debate. No had asked T’oegye’s opinion about arranging the seats by birth year. In his reply, T’oegye elucidated how significant and complicated this issue was by bringing up several other issues linked to enshrining past worthies:

When it comes to the issue of the order of seats [in enshrining several worthies together], if we enshrine worthies in terms of their ages as you propose, we have to locate the two Yis at the eastern wall and Kim at the western wall of the shrine. Although it appears all right, I wonder whether there is any precedent that vacated the major seat of the shrine facing south and only used seats in the east and west. If there is any, it is just fine. But if not, we cannot make an impromptu law [to suit our own interests]. If it is decided to assign the seat facing south to one of these worthies, who is supposed to take it? Doesn’t it have to be Yi Chonyŏn in terms of age? However, doesn’t it have to be Kim Koengp’il in terms of dedication to the Neo-Confucian Way? I don’t think either of the above possibilities is right. If it is decided not to differentiate the order of seats and arrange all three worthies on the seat facing south and have them lined up from west to east, we end up facing the same difficulty in deciding this sequence [from west to east] too.… Although establishing shrines and deciding enshrinees in the academies is not the business of the royal court, it will eventually be informed. Thus, it is such an important issue to set the ritual principles.³⁷

T’oegye precisely understood the impact of academy ritual practices in terms of their prescriptive potential in configuring Neo-Confucian culture. In another letter to No, T’oegye again stated, “The enshrinement of worthies should be decided based on their Neo-Confucian scholarship because academies are established in order to promote the Neo-Confucian Way.”³⁸

However, T’oegye opposed removing the two Yis because he thought it was too much to enshrine Kim at the expense of expelling other local worthies.³⁹ In his letter to Hwang, he revisited this issue by scrutinizing the details of how to arrange the order of tablets:

How has the order of seats been decided? I still think it should be based upon Neo-Confucian scholarship. However, I do not think it is proper to enshrine the two Yis under Kim Koengp’il.… As for scholarship, the two Yis do not have something that can be called the Neo-Confucian Way. When it comes to moral virtue, the three of them show no distinct difference. Then, it seems improper, in terms of both the substance of this affair and human emotion, to enshrine loyal and virtuous worthies of the previous dynasty [under Kim] only in the name of Neo-Confucian scholarship. What do you say about it? So, I think the two Yis should be enshrined below Kim, but they should be arranged together facing south. I suggest placing a screen between the tablets for Kim Koengp’il and Yi Chonyŏn so that one tablet does not dominate the other.⁴⁰

Hwang, however, persisted in his objection against enshrining the two Yis together with Kim. One of his letters to T’oegye shows clearly how the Sŏngju scholars reacted. Scholars in this area had a meeting in Yŏngbong Academy to discuss the issue. Although there is no description of who they were or how they gathered, they put the issue to a vote. All of them voted for enshrining Kim as the major figure, and about ten voted for enshrining Yi Inbok below Kim. But scholars opposed enshrining Yi Chonyŏn, arguing that “the old man with Buddhist beads in his hand” could not be enshrined in an academy. This letter states that scholars at the meeting claimed that students who wanted to dedicate themselves to Neo-Confucian scholarship would leave the academy at once if Yi Chonyŏn were to be enshrined.⁴¹ What is interesting in this debate is the silence regarding what Neo-Confucian scholarship stands for in the rhetoric that both T’oegye and Hwang constantly used as the standard for evaluating past worthies. The extensive exchange of letters and subsequent meetings of scholars allowed them to pin down this rather daunting idea. Thus, the various deliberations that took place in exchanges of letters enabled scholars in T’oegye’s circle to figure out how to inculcate the Neo-Confucian ritual norms as part of their self-identity.

Meanwhile, T’oegye grew suspicious about Yi Inbok’s personality, owing to several discrepant descriptions of him in different sources, and even suggested enshrining Kim Chongjik (1431–1492) instead. Although not from the Sŏngju area, Kim Chongjik, who taught Kim Koengp’il, had studied in the state school of this town.⁴² The absence of sources does not allow us to trace how this issue developed thereafter. In 1568, five years after Hwang Chunnyang’s death, Chŏng Ku (1543–1620), who was from Sŏngju, led the local scholars to decide on the issues of enshrinement and the name of the academy. His letter to T’oegye written in that year shows that Sŏngju scholars tried to enshrine two Neo-Confucian scholars of Song China, Cheng Yi (1033–1107) and Zhu Xi, in the major post of the shrine and Kim Koengp’il below them, and they followed Zhu Xi’s precedent by naming the building after a place.⁴³ These two Chinese scholars were enshrined because Sŏngju has places named after the pen names of Cheng and Zhu, which are Ich’ŏn and Un’gok, respectively. The name of the academy was therefore changed to Ch’ŏn’gok Academy, taking the second characters of those place-names.⁴⁴ Although T’oegye did not lead the discussion of these issues, Chŏng’s letter to him shows that Sŏngju scholars set about conducting academy affairs after confirming his concurrence.⁴⁵ After the ritual for enshrining these past worthies was completed, Chŏng sent another letter to T’oegye to report on it. He also sought T’oegye’s opinion on the details of academy ritual and the qualifications to be used in selecting academy scholars.⁴⁶

T’oegye’s collaboration with Yi Chŏng (1512–1571) also shows how the elaborate exchanges of letters between them shaped the decisions about rituals in the academies. Yi and T’oegye worked together at the Royal Academy (Sŏnggyun’gwan) in 1552 respectively as an assistant master and a headmaster, and they solidified their relationship through academic exchanges.⁴⁷ Yi was motivated to further the academy movement and publication of Confucian texts. When he went to serve as the magistrate of Kyŏngju, the old capital of the Silla Kingdom, in 1560, T’oegye and Yi committed themselves to fostering both the publication project and the academy movement. In particular, the issue of enshrinement at Sŏak Academy lasted throughout Yi’s tenure in Kyŏngju, for two and a half years. Yi made a tour of inspection around the tombs of Silla kings right after his inauguration and lamented their dilapidated condition. The tombs of King Muyŏl (r. 654–661) and Kim Yusin (595–673), in particular, attracted his attention. The record of conduct of Yi reads that he wrote ritual orations for these men and performed sacrificial rites as a token of respect for their merit in unifying three kingdoms in the seventh century. He also established Sŏak Academy near the tombs of these two worthies.⁴⁸ As in the case of Yŏngbong Academy, the focus of debate was the qualification of past worthies to be enshrined there. The Record of Sŏak Academy (Sŏak chi) briefly explains that Yi Chŏng built a shrine for Kim Yusin, and local scholars suggested enshrining the eminent Silla scholars—Sŏl Ch’ong (d.u.) and Ch’oe Ch’iwŏn (857–?)—together with Kim.⁴⁹ The correspondence between T’oegye and Yi, however, shows that the issue brought about contentious debates among Kyŏngju scholars as well as scholar-officials in Seoul. According to T’oegye’s letter to Yi in 1561, a rumor that Yi was building a huge Buddhist temple to perform rituals for King Muyŏl and Kim Yusin was spread in Seoul and drew harsh criticism from court ministers. T’oegye suggested to Yi that he repair the tombs of King Muyŏl and Kim Yusin to prevent people from freely entering them. He further advised Yi to enshrine only Kim Yusin and to have this institution focus on enhancing Neo-Confucian scholarship. T’oegye believed that doing so would justify the establishment of the academy and stop the criticism. He deplored the situation in which the academies suffered all these slanders, as in the case of Yŏngbong Academy.⁵⁰

Even though Yi accepted T’oegye’s suggestion, he wanted to enshrine two late-Koryŏ Confucian scholars, Yi Chehyŏn (1287–1367) and Yi Chono (1341–1371), together with Kim Yusin. Because Yi Chŏng had decided that the shrine would be called the Shrine for Local Worthies (Hyanghyŏnsa), T’oegye agreed that all three should be enshrined together.⁵¹ T’oegye later argued that even Kim Yusin, as well as Yi Chehyŏn and Yi Chono, should be enshrined in a local shrine but not in the academy, considering their lack of commitment to the Confucian Way. He elaborated on this issue again in his 1562 letter to Yi, in which he argued that local elites should take care of the rituals for the three local worthies. He further suggested that Yi maintain the academy as a place for upholding Neo-Confucian scholarship.⁵² Although no remaining source explains why T’oegye changed his opinion on the enshrinement, the painstaking debates on the same ritual question happened almost concurrently at Yŏngbong Academy. He may have sharpened his viewpoint as he dealt with the same issue in two different areas. His letter addressed to Hwang in this year shows that the case of Yŏngbong Academy functioned as a reference for him in resolving the case of Sŏak Academy. T’oegye here asserted the required qualification of past worthies for enshrinement:

I heard that Yi Chŏng is in trouble [with the issue of enshrinement]. He gave up the idea to build a new shrine for King Muyŏl.… However, he wants to enshrine Yi Chehyŏn and Yi Chono in addition to Kim Yusin. I do not think it is a bad idea to have local people perform rituals for local worthies. However, it is not right to have scholars studying in the academy do it because it is not proper to enshrine people with military merit like Kim Yusin there. It will cause contentious debates and will be more serious than the case of Yŏngbong Academy. I cannot figure out how Yi Chŏng will take care of this.⁵³

In both cases, the distinction between local and Confucian worthies brought about contention in setting the standard for enshrinement. Magistrates such as No and Yi were inclined to understand the academy rituals as part of administrative affairs in the local society. However, for T’oegye, the ritual practices in the academy symbolized the reciprocity between the localization of Neo-Confucian principles and the universalization of local heritage as a model of Neo-Confucian culture. Therefore, the process of deciding on worthies to be enshrined not only defined the lineage of Neo-Confucian scholarship but also set locality at the center of Confucian civilization. The intention of the magistrates who took care of practical needs for the establishment of academies, however, could not be ignored. T’oegye’s letter to Yi in 1563 exhibits the reconciliation between Yi and Kyŏngju scholars on this issue. Sŏak Academy came to enshrine Kim Yusin, following Yi’s opinion, together with Sŏl Ch’ong and Ch’oe Ch’iwŏn, following the opinion of local scholars.⁵⁴ T’oegye and scholars in his circle extensively exchanged letters as the major communicative tools in resolving their pivotal concerns, in order for this new institution to function as the center of the local scholarly community. In this respect, both direct and indirect participation in epistolary practices, either as correspondents or in expressing opinions about issues discussed in letters, characterized membership in the new scholarly community formed around local academies. Epistolary interactions aptly fostered both communicative efficiency and discursive cooperation.

However, this new trend, did not attract all scholars. For instance, Chŏng Inhong (1535–1623) denounced it: “T’oegye collaborated with a group of scholars, including Yi Chŏng and Hwang Chunnyang, who were driven out by genuine Confucians due to their greed for profits and shamelessness. T’oegye corresponded with them to the extent to form [several volumes of] books [with these letters] while [pretending to] discuss Neo-Confucian learning and model themselves after past Confucian worthies.”⁵⁵ This criticism shows that contemporary scholars considered the extensive exchange of letters part of the new networking around academies. In particular, Chŏng pinpointed new Neo-Confucian scholarship, extensive letter writing, and the subsequent publication of these letters as characteristics of social networking in T’oegye’s circle. Thus a new scholarship and written culture together composed a distinctive lifestyle and identity for a specific emerging scholar group.

The simultaneous application of the genre of letters for both academic scrutiny and sociopolitical agendas obscured the boundary between these two domains at the textual level; the language and rhetoric employed for academic and political purposes converged and mixed. Epistolary practices in the local academy networks, therefore, took on both scholarly and sociopolitical connotations even in casual communication. The academic discourse, the sociopolitical agenda, and the mode of textual practice tightly interlocked to form the intellectual culture of the period. Participation in epistolary networks became the source of scholarly and political authority for local Confucian scholars. The distinction made between the participants and the nonparticipants in the local scholarly scene clearly articulated the lines drawn in the political and intellectual topography of Chosŏn in this period.

PUBLICATION OF LETTERS, PUBLICATION THROUGH LETTERS

Following the vision of T’oegye, academy scholars read letters for their studies and exchanged their views about them through either face-to-face discussions or correspondence. Moreover, the resources and networks formed around the local academies enabled the rural scholars to publish these letter anthologies for wider dissemination. Many other scholarly titles were also produced in academies, which developed into the most prominent nonofficial publication centers during the late Chosŏn period. Book production previously had been dominated by the state authorities and Buddhist temples.⁵⁶ According to Sŏ Yugu’s (1764–1845) Surveys on Publications (Nup’an’go), for instance, seventy-eight academies published 167 titles until 1796. And about 80 percent of these titles were the collected writings of individual scholars. At first, academies published the collected writings of those who were enshrined there, but from the late seventeenth century, the descendants dominated the publication of their ancestors’ collected writings by using the printing facilities at academies. These publishing academies were predominantly located in the Yŏngnam area.⁵⁷ The number of printed copies of each book varied from twenty to three hundred, which were distributed to descendants and related academies or local schools. In some cases, academy scholars presented newly published copies to the royal court to honor the authors.⁵⁸ In many cases, the book gifts between academies formed the most substantial part of their book collections, which made them the major library facilities in local societies.⁵⁹ However, book gifts were exchanged only between academies advocating the same political faction. Due to the politicization of library collections, it was hardly possible to find religious titles or books for practical purposes.⁶⁰ In academies, the books published and those included in the library collections functioned as a conspicuous political statement.

The publication project brought together many hands in the multifarious processes of compiling, editing, proofreading, printing, and distributing books. The importance of collaboration encouraged extensive interactions through correspondence among participants. In this regard, it is no surprise that T’oegye’s collaborators in the local academy movement dominated the publication projects. Yi Chŏng particularly played an active role. His record of conduct reads, “If there were any books written by either Chinese or Korean scholars on Neo-Confucianism that had not been published and introduced throughout the country, Yi and T’oegye copyedited and published them together through exchanging [letters].”⁶¹ This record enumerates fifteen such titles published through their epistolary collaboration.⁶² As both central curriculum and a major means of communication for scholarly activities, letters became an indispensable genre.

The letters exchanged between T’oegye and Hwang Chunnyang also show how they worked on publication projects while developing local academy networks. Hwang, in particular, led the publication of T’oegye’s anthology The Abbreviated Essence of Master Zhu Xi’s Letters. By 1558, T’oegye and Hwang had already gone through five or six revisions to reduce typographical mistakes and omissions caused in the course of transcription by several different people.⁶³ Besides discussing practical matters such as the selection of printing type,⁶⁴ they debated further about the fact that T’oegye annotated and punctuated Zhu Xi’s letters while anthologizing them. He added explanatory notes at the beginning of each volume about the people who appeared in it. He also made notes at the beginning or end of each letter regarding its contents. More active interposition of T’oegye’s voice can be observed in his interlinear annotations on terms and events added within the original letters. T’oegye said that although he initially worked on annotations to aid his memory, he later came to use them to clarify in what contexts Zhu Xi had written those letters, and how Zhu Xi lived his life.⁶⁵

The correspondence between T’oegye and Hwang deliberated on the impact of editorial changes on textual meanings. In 1558, Hwang brought up a very significant point about the conflict between authorial intention and editorial responsibility. Because T’oegye had added various editorial touches to Zhu Xi’s letters, Hwang argued that T’oegye should take into account how the editing process would unexpectedly influence the readership.

It seems that there is no room left for further scrutiny in this book in terms of both the broadness of observations and the precision of annotations. However, some are detailed and others are not. Also, there are some parts that do not provide annotations on [some] questions that are to be further expounded.… It is something to be happy about to know the meaning of one character, if one is studying. In publication, however, the work would be “incomplete” if one thing were left unexplained. If we print this book in a slovenly way like this, I am afraid it will end up being incomplete. In some parts, meanings are printed in big characters, [which are for the original quotations from Zhu Xi’s writings,] and annotations are not added [in small characters]. This may cause sincere scholars who seek the Neo-Confucian Way to find teachers and get answers to their questions. Or, it may cause those who borrow and transcribe this book not to discover the problems, although they diligently look for them. What do you say about this heedlessness? … Although your anthology was produced for private use, I am not sure whether scholars regard this book as proper for the present. Can you figure out what kind of concerns the deficiencies of this book might cause people?⁶⁶

At first, however, T’oegye did not take Hwang’s concern seriously. In his reply in 1558, he humbly admitted that all the fault was his because he dared to anthologize and annotate Zhu Xi’s letters, separating them from their original form. He ascribed the errors accumulated in the course of this process to the lack of references as well as to his lack of enthusiasm. Without offering any resolution for the problem that Hwang raised, T’oegye simply expressed his appreciation by mentioning how fortunate he was to have Hwang’s insight in revising the anthology.⁶⁷ T’oegye did not understand why Hwang cared so much about the act of anthologizing and annotating in terms of defining the textual meanings. In fact, Hwang understood the publication of this anthology with T’oegye’s annotations to be the creation of new meanings for Zhu Xi’s letters, and he emphasized this point as the major editorial concern.

Accordingly, T’oegye came to take it seriously. In another letter, he claimed that annotations on typographical errors and suspicious characters should be added, and he also argued that there should be no fault in his annotations on the life of Zhu Xi, because he had referred to The Record of Master Zhu Xi’s Conduct (Chuja haengjang). T’oegye underscored the significance of his annotations because they would guide readers to understand how Zhu Xi’s scholarship was actually composed. Here he claimed that if the annotations were to be removed because they were unclear or incomplete, there would be another gap because the annotations were necessary for readers’ understanding.⁶⁸

T’oegye wrote a preface to the anthology in 1558, the year of the epistolary discussion with Hwang. Further, he displayed a very interesting strategy for controlling the meanings produced through annotating Zhu Xi’s letters. He asked Hwang to write an epilogue to share the responsibility for publication in 1561.⁶⁹ Contention about controlling the meanings of Zhu Xi’s letters was concentrated in paratextual spaces appended to the original letters. Paratextual elements are subordinate to their texts, and their effects rest upon subconscious influences on the author’s interests rather than direct impositions of meanings.⁷⁰ This is why they function as “thresholds” that transform texts into books by linking the discourses of texts and of publishing. However, the annotator’s work does not always remain subordinate to the author’s intentions. Although the act of annotating certainly takes authority from the canonicity of the texts commented on, this same act alienates annotators from the texts by highlighting the contextual gap between textual production and annotation.⁷¹ In particular, T’oegye’s preface placed before Zhu Xi’s letters could have directed the readers’ understanding of the main texts by setting them in the context of editing rather than of original texts. Here, he articulated that his purpose in reading Zhu Xi’s writings was initially to learn Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucian scholarship. This prescribed the meaning of Zhu Xi’s letters in a scholarly frame; letters became the “metatexts” of Neo-Confucianism. The process of anthologization, as such, excluded letters that might not fit this reading strategy. This clear statement by the editor, placed before the main texts, could have molded readers’ interpretations.

Decisions about the technology of book production also triggered elaborate epistolary discussions. Whereas the first three versions of this anthology were printed using movable type, the following five versions were printed with woodblocks (see table 3.1). Because woodblock printing antedates movable type, the latter is generally considered more advanced technologically. However, the return to woodblock printing in publishing The Abbreviated Essence of Master Zhu Xi’s Letters betrays this perception. T’oegye’s letter to Yu Chungnyŏng written in 1566 shows how scholars involved in the publication deliberated on this issue. It specifically elucidates the advantage of woodblock printing, particularly in manipulating paratextual elements:

After reading your eldest son’s [Yu Unnyong (1539–1601)] letter, I learned of the plan to republish [The Abbreviated Essence of Master Zhu Xi’s Letters] with headnotes added [in the empty space of the upper parts of pages]. There is nothing wrong with adding headnotes to rectify errors and add annotations, as shown in the recent publication of The Record of Master Zhu Xi’s Conduct in Yangsan. Your son mentioned that although it is all right if there is space in the upper part of each page, it is impossible [to emend it] if there is no space. However, I don’t think it is a problem. To rectify errors and add the missing parts after publishing The Record of Master Zhu Xi’s Conduct in Yangsan, Pae Samik [1534–1588], who took charge of this process, carved out every single error and used separate wood pieces for those parts [which fit into the parts carved out] to insert the correct contents. In this way, it is not impossible. Also, as to adding sentences and annotations … as your son said, “old characters on woodblocks should be carved out and newly added contents should be engraved in thin characters.”⁷²

As this quotation illustrates, woodblock printing allows for corrections in the main texts as well as the insertion of paratextual elements even after publication is completed. Although carving requires enormous energy and painstaking concentration, the ability to rework the blocks even after publication rendered this method feasible. Movable type did not allow publishers to revisit the contents of publications, because the type sets were disassembled in order to be used for other projects. Ki Taesŭng, in his epilogue to the 1567 version, explained that this book had not been widely distributed due to the use of movable type. He argued that although the anthology had been published in Sŏngju, Haeju, and P’yŏngyang, one after the other, the disassembly of the type sets even before enough volumes had been printed prevented its wide dissemination. Ki explained that Yu Chungnyŏng, as the magistrate of Chŏngju, printed this book again by carving woodblocks, which captured it permanently.⁷³ In this sense, woodblock printing was more advantageous than movable type for printing many books without temporal limitation. More significantly, publishers had to invest considerable resources to cast enough numbers and varieties of type to be able to publish books. Kai-wing Chow presents several advantages of woodblock printing in discussing the print culture of early modern China: freedom in page layout, flexibility in time of production, a low level of investment, minimal skill required, and great mobility.⁷⁴ Although we cannot directly apply all these paratexual, technological, and economic merits of woodblock printing in explaining the sixteenth-century Chosŏn context, we can see that T’oegye appreciated them in his publication project.

The extensive exchange of letters allowed T’oegye and his collaborators to iron out various issues surrounding the publication of key titles in the rise of the new Neo-Confucian moral philosophy. Besides handling practical and technical questions, these scholars were able to deliberate on the ways the material conditions of reading would shape the meaning of texts. The textualization of all these issues in epistolary space turned out to be the central process of identity building for the local scholarly community.

ACADEMIES AND THE CULTURE OF RECORD KEEPING

Apart from the intensive reading and elaborate publication of letters as the principal pedagogical tools, rural scholars could find an alternative sociopolitical life at the local level through the quasi-official function of local academies. At the core of this alternative lifestyle lay the rise of a new textual culture in academy networks. Academy affairs were documented and archived, so the production and management of texts became a crucial part of daily life for scholars. They sharpened their skills and innovated to produce, update, circulate, distribute, and archive various documents and textual ephemera. Academy scholars came to match clerks in government offices in their record-keeping expertise. For instance, the regulations for the students were drafted, displayed, preserved, and retrieved, just as magistrates kept and referred to the law codes. The rosters of enrolled students were recorded and updated regularly by academy staff, similar to the household registries filed in the magistrates’ offices. The academy staff also kept records for the properties and ledgers with information about financial resources, which required them to have highly specialized proficiency in bookkeeping. The special events and occasions organized in the academies were meticulously chronicled in a similar manner as official records were created.

Here, Raymond Williams’s critique of literary criticism and the conventional notion of literature is very useful to better frame the complexity of the written culture developed in local academies. Williams claims that canonical norms that formed around literary genres, particularly novels as the literary symbol of the rise of the modern nation-state, limit our appreciation of the “multiplicity of writing.”⁷⁵ Inspired by this claim, Brinkley Messick shows how the ordinary genres of “local bureaucratic and legal literatures” constructed a distinctive set of non-Western identities in the northern highland of Yemen, which was not colonized by Western powers.⁷⁶ While agreeing with the problematic elaborated by both, I find the textual culture developed in Chosŏn local academies more ambiguous in calibrating between the canonical literary genre and the “multiplicity of writing.” Because the practice of writing and reading letters was crucial in generating new scholarly identities for local literati, letters developed into a canonical genre for academy scholars. At the same time, they needed to familiarize themselves with multiple local administrative literatures, which quite often took epistolary format, in order to create their actual social roles. In this respect, the “canonical literature” was not always antithetical to the “multiplicity of writing” in Chosŏn scholarly culture. This chameleonlike utilization of letters for everything from highly philosophical discourses to mundane exchanges empowered their users to both weather the challenges in daily life and raise their voices on sociopolitical issues with national impact.

The documents preserved in Tosan Academy, which functioned as the academic center for T’oegye and his intellectual offspring throughout the late Chosŏn period, illuminate the wide gamut of textual practices as well as the sociopolitical connotations that they delivered. Scholars at this academy had nurtured the habit of recording the rituals performed there. For instance, The List of Years of the Establishment of Academies (Sŏwŏn ch’anggŏn yŏnjo) itemized the information about important academies where T’oegye and his ancestors or disciples were enshrined, also logging the major rituals performed until the late eighteenth century.⁷⁷ Similarly, The Traces of Events in Tosan Academy (Tosan Sŏwŏn sajŏk) chronicled the details of major rituals performed from the establishment of this academy to 1868.⁷⁸ Some were sponsored by the monarch and performed on his behalf by ministers dispatched from the royal court. On these occasions, the preparation for and processes of performance were more meticulously delineated.⁷⁹ The royal court bestowed such rituals nine times in total from 1614 to 1839, and these records offer eyewitness accounts of academy scholars’ interaction with the central government. The significance of the rituals also led academy scholars to produce The Record of Ceremonies (Holgi), which documented the detailed sequence of ritual performance for reference purposes. The rituals represented the ultimate mastery of classical knowledge and its embodiment; thus their execution was an integral part of academy education. The complexity of the ritual protocols, however, could always cause difficulties in actual performance. For instance, the regular ritual for T’oegye and Cho Mok, who were enshrined at Tosan Academy, required eight participants to follow eighty-two steps in a seamless flow.⁸⁰ The instructions for local drinking ceremonies held there comprised eighteen chapters, which respectively ordained as many as forty-nine steps.⁸¹ Without the aid of detailed records, it was virtually impossible to replicate the rituals as they had been designed. The academy scholars thus discharged a double-layered process of embodiment: through performing rituals in academy settings and also by restaging them in the texts. The ability to reciprocate between corporeal and textual domains became the core of academy rituals, demonstrating scholars’ exclusive connection to past ideals, which were too elusive not to put in writing.

Tosan Academy also left seven daily records on controversial issues that the scholars had to communally resolve, including contention between the academy scholars and the secondary status groups who requested equal educational and ritual rights, debates surrounding the theft of T’oegye’s ritual tablet from the shrine, the installation of a new ritual tablet for Cho Mok, and the publication of the roster of T’oegye school scholars. The chronicles frequently employed an intertextual structure to draw conclusions that would defuse any further contention. For instance, the requests of the concubines’ sons from elite families to gain equal access to the academy from 1884 to 1885 caused both these secondary sons and the academy scholars to produce various documents, which were either circulated in the local communities or submitted to the government offices.⁸² The record of this particular event displays how the academy scholars manipulated these texts to create a coherent narrative supporting their stance. The contention began in October 1884, when the concubines’ sons presented a government decision document (kwanmun) to Tosan Academy, which stipulated that secondary sons had permission to attend local academies and requested their equal participation in academy affairs. The entry for this day includes the excerpt from this kwanmun document with which the academy scholars justified spurning the request. They claimed that the decision applied only to the particular case that had led the government to issue the document.⁸³ This rejection sparked a physical confrontation between the two groups. On the tenth day of the second month in 1885, the secondary sons beat up an academy slave and threatened to destroy the houses of T’oegye’s descendants.⁸⁴ Four days later, the academy scholars held a meeting to respond to this incident and issued two documents—the agreement of academy scholars (sŏwŏn wanŭi) and the items agreed upon among T’oegye’s clan members (chongdang chŏlmok)—which are included in the record in full. These documents reconfirmed the barring of concubines’ sons from academy affairs and the collective retaliation against them that would occur if physical confrontations ever happened again.⁸⁵ Tosan Academy, however, began to receive a written blitz by two groups of concubines’ sons from different areas. Their criticism took the form of circular letters (t’ongmun) signed by all the members. This particular genre, in this particular case, effectively stressed the senders’ unity and resolution to protest as a group. Unlike for the texts produced by academy scholars themselves, the record includes only very short summaries of the circular letters with negative comments on them, basically reducing the claims made by the concubines’ sons to senseless whining. An astonishing reversal, however, took place when Kim Chinu (d.u.), a scholar from Andong, presented a memorial to the throne in which he criticized the scholars of Tosan Academy for not following the court decision and opening their gate to concubines’ sons. The king responded that this was a vicious case that the court should investigate.⁸⁶ The record exceptionally includes the whole draft of this memorial. Following this, academy scholars extracted the several key phrases from Kim’s memorial that could undermine their claims and added their justifications for them item by item.⁸⁷ Two months later, more interestingly, two scholars from Tosan Academy submitted a petition reiterating this record to the provincial governor’s office.⁸⁸

The absence of further information does not allow us to trace how this issue was brought to a conclusion. However, the complexity and gravity of the situation required the academy scholars to create a meticulous record that included other related documents, such as the memorial to the throne, the agreements among the scholars, excerpts from government documents, and so on. The scholars needed the skill to analyze various genres of administrative documents and public texts and synthesize them with their own narratives. This textual culture emerging in local academies brought about a new kind of relationship with texts in the local literati’s daily life. Coherent intertextual composition in record keeping was completely different from reading Confucian classics and writing treatises on them. This new relation took root in local societies through the mundane textual administration in the daily management of academies. Far from creating distance from the state authorities, this made negotiation with local magistrates’ offices routine in academy life.

MUNDANE DOCUMENTATION AND THE RISE OF QUASI-ADMINISTRATIVE FUNCTIONS

Among many issues, the management of academy properties required scholars to interact with state authorities. Lands and slaves formed the two pillars of an academy’s economy,⁸⁹ so the scholars needed to keep records of the changes in them, which involved various kinds of paperwork. The slaves as property differed from lands due to the fluctuations in the size of holdings. Deaths and births necessitated constant updates of the slave roster (nobian) over generations.⁹⁰ The purchase of slaves was another variable, but that was under close scrutiny by the state. The state had good reason to monitor such transactions because the slaves assigned to the academies were exempt from paying taxes and from military duties. Selling and buying slaves required approval from the magistrates’ offices, for which academies had to put together a petition (soji), proof of transactions (maemae mun’gi), and the statements of sellers and witnesses (ch’osa). Tosan Academy has twenty sets of documents that were filed to purchase slaves. Remarkably, all but four of them were produced in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This shows that, except during the first several decades after its establishment, the academy had greater interest in slaves’ marriages and births to swell its holdings than in direct purchases, which required coping with state surveillance.

Marriages between academy slaves and slaves owned by different institutions or individuals therefore frequently raised tensions over the ownership of the couples’ children. For instance, Tosan Academy contended with the state postal station in Mangch’ang over the ownership of slaves in 1801. A female slave of Tosan Academy married Kim Han’gi (d.u.), a slave at the Mangch’ang station, and they had two daughters. According to the three petitions presented by the station slaves to the magistrate’s office in 1801, one daughter had served the station and the other the academy. However, the head slave of Tosan Academy came over one day and claimed that both of them should work for the academy.⁹¹ The magistrate’s office immediately ordered the Mangch’ang station to submit supporting documents, and they provided the household registry for Kim Han’gi. The copy of Kim’s household registry was again forwarded to Tosan Academy for their review.⁹² According to the report issued by the magistrate’s office (ch’ŏpchŏng), it confirmed Kim as a slave belonging to the station and warned Tosan Academy not to encroach upon the station’s property.⁹³

Because the slaves composed the major labor force in academies, scholars were also sensitive to local officials’ attempts to impose either tax or corvée duties on them. For instance, Tosan Academy presented four ch’ŏpchŏng reports over seven years to the governor’s office in Andong to protest the military duties imposed upon one of its slaves, Kim Ch’isŏn (d.u.).⁹⁴ On some occasions, the academy and slaves orchestrated protests against state offices. One was about the cotton tax levied on a female slave, as the magistrate’s office misclassified her as a shaman practitioner. This slave presented a soji petition to complain about the unfair tax. According to the partly damaged official decision, however, the magistrate’s office refused to rectify the case.⁹⁵ In six years, an academy staff member submitted a short report (komok) of only one sentence to the magistrate’s office to request that this slave be exempt from the cotton tax. The magistrate’s decision written on this report says that it examined the roster of slaves in Tosan Academy and confirmed this slave’s name there; this made it clear that the cotton tax levied on her would be retracted.⁹⁶ Both academy scholars and slaves themselves were involved in the textual practices in various administrative genres in order to negotiate with the state authorities. It is notable that the petition presented by this female slave was written in literary Chinese, and the skillful calligraphic style shows that it must have been written by someone very well versed in literary Chinese classics. Although it was illegal, it was not impossible to submit petitions drafted in vernacular Korean on local levels, as local governments officially recognized such petitions during the late Chosŏn period.⁹⁷ Although the absence of further sources prevents us from discovering the exact ways this particular text was written and presented, the slaves seem to have been closely interacting with the academy staff to pin down the tax issues, as a smooth resolution was beneficial for both parties. The academy staff could have written this petition on behalf of the slave. Another possibility, although very slim, is the slave’s literacy in literary Chinese. For whatever reasons, some men and women from humble origins could read and write literary Chinese during the Chosŏn dynasty. Among the texts preserved in Tosan Academy, six procuratorial letters (p’aeji) confirm this. These literary Chinese documents state that the head slave of Tosan Academy was entrusted to sell or transfer academy lands for various purposes.⁹⁸ Considering the significance of the tasks, it is not far-fetched to presume that the head slaves were proficient enough in literary Chinese to deal with such transactions, in which they would have had to handle various official documents.

Mastery in the production, archiving, and retrieval of various official documents, day-to-day duties for academy scholars, figured prominently in the quasi-official function of academies as the intermediary between the state authorities and other social actors. This new textual culture spread and also affected the social life of countryside literati. The publication of genealogies by major lineage groups in the Yŏngnam area mainly took place in the late sixteenth century, when the newly established academies enshrined the notable ancestors of these clans.⁹⁹ In other words, the local academy movement induced the elite families to put together and organize information about their ancestry and kinship boundary, for which expertise in documentation held vital significance. The skill sets developed in local academies to administer various texts could carry over to reorganizing the elite lineage groups in the sixteenth century.

More important, most of the administrative documents fall into the broad category of epistolary genres. The administration of local academies consisted mostly of letters received, the decisions made based upon these letters, and outgoing letters. The official decision documents frequently took letter form because the decisions were mostly communicated in letters. The use of epistolary formats for administrative documents was not uncommon in other parts of the world. For example, Dutch archives show that simple governing bodies in the Netherlands often communicated their decisions through letters, and the draft versions of outgoing letters functioned as the official documents. The incoming letters and the draft decision-cum-outgoing letters together formed the “verbaalarchief,” which was “one long continuous series of draft decisions, arranged by the date the decisions were taken.”¹⁰⁰ The epistolary protocols in ancient Greek society and premodern Islamic society, likewise, regarded stylistic eloquence and administrative prose as indivisible components.¹⁰¹ Even after the development of modern state governance, administrative correspondence has been important in government and politics, as shown in the scandal of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails in contemporary American politics.

Natalie Zemon Davis cogently showed that ordinary supplicants in sixteenth-century France harnessed whatever textual and discursive means were available in drafting their remission letters to persuade the king or courts, which made these letters a mixed genre.¹⁰² Writing good letters enabled social actors to have access to and communicate with state authorities. Likewise, the Chosŏn official documents and reports required both officials and nonofficial participants to communicate effectively in writing. Such skill was even more necessary in creating the petitionary documents through which citizens tried to persuade the state authorities. The practice of letter writing before the introduction of “preprinted blank forms” for government usage delivered powerful political connotations, as it manifested the writing subjects’ capability to command the blank sheets of paper.¹⁰³ Mastering versatile usages of letter writing ideally equipped Chosŏn literati with the essential political tool—administrative literacy.