Gods of Mount Tai: Familiarity and the Material Culture of North China, 1000–2000, written by Susan Naquin

Susan Naquin's new book does what it says on the cover: With inimitable thoroughness and an almost five-decade-long familiarity with the place and the sources, Naquin traces the rise and fall of the personified gods and goddesses of Mount Tai over the course of a millennium.She also makes some genuinely innovative arguments about materiality and public art in early-modern China, but to fully understand her interventions, it's both useful and interesting to consider the scholarly background against which this book is set.Naquin tells us: "There is currently no field of Ming/Qing religious art […]."1This is not the same thing as saying there is no scholarship on religious images and objects from the Ming and Qing dynasties.Indeed, Westerners have been writing about Chinese temples and their contents since the days of William of Rubruck (fl.mid-13th century), and this literature only increases in density as it approaches the present.2It is, however, fair to question the existence of a unified field of Ming-Qing religious art in the sense that "Buddhist Art" or "Ming-Qing Literature" comprise "fields," i.e. groups of scholars in conversation, with journals, conferences, grad courses, a relatively shared sense of research objects and problematics, etc. (What the English words "religion" or "art" should mean in the Chinese context are, of course, their own much-debated problems.3)I thus essay a "state of the (arguably-nonexistent) field" in 2023.I cite only book-length studies in Western languages, as articles and chapters are too 1 Naquin, Gods of Mount Tai, 375. 2 Jackson and Morgan, The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck, 150-56.3 I.e., for "art," see Clunas, Art in China and Pictures and Visuality;