Where does Neo-Confucianism a movement that from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries profoundly influenced the way people understood the world and responded to it fit into our story of China s history?

This interpretive, at times polemical, inquiry into the Neo-Confucian engagement with the literati as the social and political elite, local society, and the imperial state during the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties is also a reflection on the role of the middle period in China s history. The book argues that as Neo-Confucians put their philosophy of learning into practice in local...