Lecture

Common Knowers: Readers, Books, and the Making of Vernacular Knowledge in China

Joan Judge, Professor of History, York University, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada

In this series of three lectures, Joan Judge explores the relationship between physical books and historical common knowers in early twentieth century China.

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March 23 - 26, 2026

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Hybrid event: Class of 78 Orrery Pavilion, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, 6th Floor; and virtual (via Zoom)

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Open to the Public

Hosted by: Kislak Center

Registration information: all three lectures will be held in person and also streamed virtually, via Zoom webinar. Please register separately for each lecture (see below).

What did common readers read in the midst of the revolutions that punctuated China’s early twentieth century? How did they manage the challenges of the era — from new technologies to novel diseases, from institutional failure to commercial globalization? What did they know and how did they know it?

These questions animate this lecture series, which focuses on the relationship between physical books and historical common knowers. This is a challenging relationship to track. Common knowers are elusive; their acts of reading rarely documented. The books they used, the last vestiges of their reading and knowing processes, have been unevenly preserved and often dismissed as cultural detritus. In an age when digital technologies are both expanding the quantity of textual material available to us and skewing that archive toward what is most readily available and intellectually legible, the quest to find common knowers necessitates new methodologies. These methodologies begin with locating once widely consulted how-to books and thinking with them in innovative ways. They further entail developing digital tools that can help process these heterogenous materials and facilitate tracking — over global space and historical time — the repetitions, revisions, and transformations that signal the broader contours of common knowing.

Monday, March 23, 5:30 pm: Chinese Common Readers: Toward an Understanding of Vernacular Literacy

Chinese common readers — including railway workers, farmers, and female factory managers — made themselves in the early twentieth century. They relied on an informal knowledge infrastructure comprised of lithographic publishers, independent schools, streetside bookstalls, and an as-yet largely unrecognized national book network. Tracking these readers’ activities within this infrastructure requires a vernacular literacy approach that uses actual praxis rather than abstract metrics to assess literacy. This approach moves from the remnants of practices—bookstall surveys, scribbled marginalia, how-to instructions for decocting a cure—towards a historical understanding of common readers as knowers rather than numbers.

Tuesday, March 24, 5:30 pm: Chinese How-To Books: Toward a Definition of Vernacular Knowledge

The publishers and compilers who produced how-to books for Chinese common readers undertook various forms of epistemic translation in creating usable, actionable, knowledge. They juxtaposed and interwove seemingly incommensurable elements — foreign methods, past techniques, and lived experience — into innovative assemblages that guided readers in managing disease, preserving foodstuffs, and applying new technologies. This lecture first conceptualizes vernacular knowledge which I define as the explanatory framework for practical know-how. It then sketches the broad corpus of how-to texts that disseminated this knowledge in early twentieth century China, and introduces one exemplary work, the repeatedly reprinted Ocean of Secret Techniques.

Thursday, March 26, 5:30 pm: Itinerant Chinese Texts and Images: Toward Methodologies for Tracing Epistemes

“Category books” — compilations of categorized excerpts from other books — have been a fixture of Chinese bibliography for millennia. Whether literati collectanea or commoner compendia, they have much to tell us about knowledge structures, editorial proclivities, reader interest, and lost texts. This lecture traces the itinerary of an illustrated entry on embryology from a vernacular compendia where it was featured over four centuries, backwards to its sources, forwards into new genres, and outwards into Japanese works. Digital tools can help track such itineraries, enabling us to explore why certain artefacts of knowledge traveled, with what alterations, and to what epistemic ends.

Event Series

Man standing in front of wall of bookshelves holding open book

The A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography

The Rosenbach Lectures are the longest continuing series of bibliographical lectureships in the United States. Rosenbach Fellows typically present three lectures over a period of one-two weeks.

Joan Judge

Joan Judge is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a Professor in the Department of History at York University in Toronto.

A cultural historian of print and knowledge in modern China, she is the author of The Politics of Common Reading: Vernacular Knowledge and Everyday Technics in China, 1894-1954 (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press (University of California Press, 2015), The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China (Stanford University Press, 2008), and Print and Politics: ‘Shibao’ and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford University Press, 1996).

She is also co-editor of The Sinosphere and Beyond: Essays in Honor of Joshua Fogel (DeGruyter Oldenbourg, 2024), “Publishing for Daily Life in Early Modern East Asia,” (special issue of Lingua Franca: The History of the Book in Translation 6 [2020]), Women Warriors and National Heroes: Global Histories (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), Women and the Periodical Press in China’s Global Twentieth Century: A Space of Their Own? (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and Beyond Exemplar Tales: Women’s Biography in Chinese History (University of California Press, 2011).

Featured image: Hong Kong street scene, 1940s. Carl Mydans/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock.