Abstract Late Ming court case fiction stories involving unidentifiable corpses demonstrate a spectrum of conceptions of truth and transitions within that spectrum. The material and semiotic peculiarities of these corpses, especially bodies lacking names and heads, play key roles in the fictional representation of reconstructing criminal truths and identifying bodies. Early court case fiction collections, such as Judge Bao's Hundred Cases and Longtu Court Cases, highlight Judge Bao's intellectual prowess in interpreting mystical revelations concerning the truth behind crimes and devising schemes to locate missing heads. In contrast, later narratives from early seventeenth-century vernacular fiction collections, exemplified by Three Words and Two Slaps, depict truth as emerging from the everyday activities of ordinary people, within reach of even the unvirtuous and vulgar. This shift demystifies judicial authority, redefining the locus of truth from the mystical and transcendental realm, accessible only to individuals with exceptional intellects like Bao, to the empirical domain of quotidian pursuits, specifically represented by the market and more broadly by the exchange economy. In these everyday spaces, clues to crimes and the identities of bodies are spontaneously uncovered and assembled amid various competing desires while the complex and formidable network of self-interests sometimes makes it nearly impossible to recognize the truth. These reconfigurations of the nature of truth and the agency of its discovery show the significance of the unidentifiable corpse as an epistemic and epistemological motif within the genre of court case fiction.
Jinsu Kim (Sat,) studied this question.