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The opera has subsequently been performed in Hong Kong, Beijing, Chengdu and Wuhan, and there is every reason to believe that it will continue to be performed.2 The impetus for the creation of an English-language opera based on the novel came from the Chinese Heritage Foundation, which is based in Minnesota.3 Joseph Allen, who was then the chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures, wanted to establish a connection between the opera and the University of Minnesota. Fortunately, technical help was forthcoming from the Consortium for the Study of the Premodern World at the University of Minnesota, directed by J.B. Shank and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.4 I obtained time to do the work by teaching a graduate seminar on how to make an online course, which was co-taught by Marguerite Ragnow, the curator of the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota. [...]it does seem to me that the website (at least its best parts) does offer imaginative scholarship in a way the general public can appreciate. [...]while there are many people who are purists about the novel, the novel’s own complicated history, with the uncertainty about who wrote the final forty chapters and their relation to the first eighty, as well as the numerous sequels suggest that there is a way in which the novel is and always has been open to adaptation.9 In preparing the website for this adaptation, I took full advantage of the Minnesota connections of the opera.

Some of the drawbacks of using legal sources in teaching about Chinese women's history are doubtless similar to drawbacks in using legal sources for any society -- if you read too many legal sources, you and your students will come away convinced that murder and mayhem are the order of the day in a society which was, after all, mostly peaceful. The very different nature of the Chinese legal system from the Anglo-American legal system produces another sort of difficulty -- the legal systems of the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties were not interested in protecting rights, they were interested in producing order. This is a concept that is worth unpacking with students -- if a status senior abused a junior (say if a father-in-law raped a daughter-in-law) the law will intervene because his acts are damaging to social or political order, not because he has violated her rights. Certain aspects of the Chinese legal system, like torture, appall modern sensibilities; it is important to work with students so that they understand that the legal system was highly articulated and committed to notions of fairness. None of these are insurmountable problems; legal sources, especially casebooks, remain one of the most valuable sources on everyday life in China, and there are now substantial materials available for classroom use. Several recent developments in the Anglophone study of Chinese law of the Ming and Qing periods have made it clear just how rich legal sources can be for the study of women and gender in China. The opening of archives and the rediscovery of casebooks has been accompanied by translations of primary sources and increasingly sophisticated analyses of legal cases, which not only contextualize the sources in terms of the operation of the legal system but which look at them as texts which have their own kind of logic. Adapted from the source document.

This book addresses the question of what world history looks like when the family is at the center of the story. People have always lived in families, but what that means has varied dramatically over time and across cultures. The family is not a \"natural\" phenomenon - it has a history. Maynes and Waltner chart this history over the course of 10,000 years, across the globe, drawing on telling examples and rich sources.

Among the first details eighteenth-century Western travelers to distant lands noticed were the local marriage customs. Jesuit missionaries were no exception. Some aspects of Chinese family life made sense to missionaries; others were either incomprehensible or judged to be problematic. Images such as the one of a bridal procession included in a 1735 account of China by the Jesuit missionary Jean Baptiste du Halde (1679–1743; see figure 1.1) can be brought into conversation with multiple sources to illuminate the grounds of contact between China and Europe, placing marriage, family formation, and gender at the center. This excursion may not

Introduces a series of journal articles devoted to the subject. Adapted from the source document.