Confucianism and Family Rituals in Imperial China: A Social History of Writing about Rites

Patricia Buckley Ebrey is a historian of imperial China, and this Princeton University Press book is a social history of the written manuals that prescribed Confucian family ritual, weddings, funerals, ancestor veneration, across the imperial period, tracing how these texts were written, revised and actually used. Its strength is treating the manuals themselves as historical artifacts with their own history of production and revision, rather than assuming a single fixed Confucian ritual practice existed unchanged across centuries. Its limit is that it is a study of prescriptive ritual literature specifically, so a claim about how ordinary households actually practiced these rites, which could and did depart from the manuals, is better checked against ethnographic or archival evidence of practice itself alongside this source.