(3 pages each essay and 3 sources each essay)
Essay 1: Womens standing at the opening of the early Modern era
A TWELFTH CENTURY C.E. DOCUMENT BY YUAN CAI, Advice About Women, explicitly
directs male heads of households in Song-dynasty China toward the imposition of a wide
variety of limitations on the women in their household. Yet the editors of the source
highlight that Yuans attitudes were newly strict and that Chinese women had been more
free in earlier times than is reflected in Yuans advice. Fortunately, we have Lu Yous
travel journal to give evidence of another mans view of women in the Chinese world, as
well as documents in Alis Islam in the Indian Ocean World and Lady Murasakis
portrayal of women in the Japanese court some two hundred years earlier to help us get a
handle on womens roles in other times and places.
For this essay, making use of Yuan Cais document plus at least three (3) other sources from the primary sources included among our course materials, explore
the portraits you see of womens social roles in various places across Eurasia in the first
few centuries after the year 1000 c.e. What kinds of limitations and freedoms do you see
reflected in the texts? To what degree do the prescribed roles for women appear to be
either practical in nature or abstractly ideological: that is, governed either by pragmatic
concerns over what can be best be achieved through the direction or control of women or
by visions of humanity larger than the particular strengths of individual women?
Essay 2: Trade patterns and relations among cultures at the opening of the early
Modern era
THUS FAR IN THE COURSE, we have found various ways to investigate trade within China through Lu Yous journal, and between cultures, including the Indian Ocean trade through the eyes of ibn Battuta and, now, European trade with China through the advice
of Francesco Pegolotti. Relying on Pegolottis Advice to Merchants and at least three (3) other sources from the primary sources included among our course materials,
explore patterns of trade in the first centuries after the year 1000 c.e. as you see them represented in these primary sources. You can note what is being traded in various of
these sources, but look also at what attitudes each author brings toward trade, toward the
other cultures with whom they expect to trade, and to the values of traded items themselves. What does Pegolottti, for example, think important to note when describing
potential trading partners in his Advice? What does ibn Battuta highlight as he is discussing potential trading sites?
