Strong minds, creative lives: a study of the biographies of Eastern Han women as found in «Hou Han shu lienü zhuan»
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis addresses a chapter titled Lienü zhuan, or Arrayed Traditions of Women from Fan Ye's (398-446) Hou Han shu, or Book of Later Han as starting point to challenge the prevailing image of early Chinese women as helpless victims of an oppressive Confucian society. The women represented therein behave as purposeful, active participants in the creation of Eastern Han social mores. Most remarkably, they can be interpreted as agents defining their social roles as wives and daughters. Chapter One focuses on the historiography of the Hou Han shu, generally, and the Lienü zhuan, in particular, and formulates some hypotheses about the extent of Fan Ye's own creative input in the process of compiling his Lienü zhuan. Chapter Two investigates previous scholarship on the genre of biographies of women and proposes a theoretical model for reading the biographies of women found in Hou Han shu based on notions of ritual discussed by Catherine Bell and by the collaboration between Seligman, Weller, Puett, and Simon. In order to gain further insight into the women represented in the text, Chapter Three analyzes the social, economic, and literary background of the seventeen women included in the text. These findings on the commonalities and differences in marital status, economic situation, political influence, literacy, and education are put to use in Chapter Four, which applies the ideas on ritualization to the social roles the women in Fan Ye's text perform as wives and daughters. The thesis ends with a partial translation of the Hou Han shu lienü zhuan chapter into English.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".