Beyond Narrative: The Rise of Historical Scholarship in Song Historiography

Abstract

This dissertation explores the development of historiography in the Song dynasty, focusing especially on two distinctive undertakings: the evidential investigation of historical sources and “facts” as Song scholars understood them, and the pursuit of historical analysis, interpretation, and explanation in the form of historical commentary. I argue that whereas earlier historians had treated narrative as the core, if not the sole, task of historical writing, the emergence of new historiographical genres in the Song and the shifts in historical consciousness that accompanied them gave rise to a distinct domain of historical scholarship alongside narrative history. The dissertation seeks to delineate these changes, explain their emergence within broader political, intellectual, and historiographical contexts, trace their subsequent development, and assess their long-term significance for the evolution of Chinese historiography. Chapters One and Two focus on historical evidential investigation. Chapter One examines Sima Guang 司馬光’s Zizhi tongjian kaoyi 資治通鑒考異—the first work to systematically lay out procedures for comparing, analyzing, and selecting among sources. Beyond reconstructing Sima Guang’s methods of evidential investigation, this chapter also seeks to contextualize the background in which this endeavor took shape and to explain why he was so determined to make it available to a broader public. Chapter Two turns to two Southern Song historians, Li Tao 李燾 and Li Xinchuan 李心傳, situating them within the aims and constraints of contemporary history compilation in the Song to understand and analyze how they inherited and transformed Sima Guang’s evidential investigation. Chapters Three and Four then turn to historical commentary. Chapter Three first traces changing attitudes toward personalized commentary and interpretation of history and shows that this previously much-contested practice came to be widely accepted and actively practiced in the Song. It then proposes possible explanations for this shift and, finally, highlights the new forms of historical consciousness that emerged in historical commentary. The last chapter offers a detailed reading and analysis of the different interpretative tendencies and explanatory orientations found in these commentaries.