We think of blue and white porcelain as the ultimate global commodity: throughout East and Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean including the African coasts, the Americas and Europe, consumers desired Chinese porcelains. Many of these were made in the kilns in and surrounding Jingdezhen. Found in almost every part of the world, Jingdezhen's porcelains had a far-reaching impact on global consumption, which in turn shaped the local manufacturing processes. The imperial kilns of Jingdezhen produced ceramics for the court, while nearby private kilns manufactured for the global market. In this beautifully illustrated study, Anne Gerritsen asks how this kiln complex could manufacture such quality, quantity and variety. She explores how objects tell the story of the past, connecting texts with objects, objects with natural resources, and skilled hands with the shapes and designs they produced. Through the manufacture and consumption of Jingdezhen's porcelains, she argues, China participated in the early modern world.

This important and overdue book examines illuminated manuscripts and other book arts of the Global Middle Ages. Illuminated manuscripts and illustrated or decorated books—like today’s museums—preserve a rich array of information about how premodern peoples conceived of and perceived the world, its many cultures, and everyone’s place in it. Often a Eurocentric field of study, manuscripts are prisms through which we can glimpse the interconnected global history of humanity.
Toward a Global Middle Ages is the first publication to examine decorated books produced across the globe during the period traditionally known as medieval. Through essays and case studies, the volume’s multidisciplinary contributors expand the historiography, chronology, and geography of manuscript studies to embrace a diversity of objects, individuals, narratives, and materials from Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas—an approach that both engages with and contributes to the emerging field of scholarly inquiry known as the Global Middle Ages.
Featuring 160 color illustrations, this wide-ranging and provocative collection is intended for all who are interested in engaging in a dialogue about how books and other textual objects contributed to world-making strategies from about 400 to 1600.

In Transcending Patterns: Silk Road Cultural and Artistic Interactions through Central Asian Textiles, Mariachiara Gasparini investigates the origin and effects of a textile-mediated visual culture that developed at the heart of the Silk Road between the seventh and fourteenth centuries. Through the analysis of the Turfan Textile Collection in the Museum of Asian Art in Berlin and more than a thousand textiles held in collections worldwide, Gasparini discloses and reconstructs the rich cultural entanglements along the Silk Road, between the coming of Islam and the rise of the Mongol Empire, from the Tarim to Mediterranean Basin. Exploring in detail the iconographic transfer between different agents and different media from Central Asian caves to South Italian churches, the author depicts and describes the movement and exchange of portable objects such as sculpture, wall painting, and silk fragments across the Asian continent and across the ages.

Traditional scholarship on manuscripts has tended to focus on issues concerning their production and has shown comparatively little interest in the cultural contexts of the manuscript book. The Medieval Manuscript Book redresses this by focusing on aspects of the medieval book in its cultural situations. Written by experts in the study of the handmade book before print, this volume combines bibliographical expertise with broader insights into the theory and praxis of manuscript study in areas from bibliography to social context, linguistics to location, and archaeology to conservation. The focus of the contributions ranges widely, from authorship to miscellaneity, and from vernacularity to digital facsimiles of manuscripts. Taken as a whole, these essays make the case that to understand the manuscript book it must be analyzed in all its cultural complexity, from production to transmission to its continued adaptation.

Memory and Agency in Ancient China offers a novel perspective on China's material culture. The volume explores the complex 'life histories' of selected objects, whose trajectories as ginle objects ('biographies') and object types ('lineages') cut across both temporal and physical space. The essays, written by a team of international scholars, analyse the objects in an effort to understand how they were shaped by the constraints of their social, political and aesthetic contexts, just as they were also guided by individual preference and capricious memory. They also demonstrate how objects were capable of effecting change. Ranging chronologically from the Neolithic to the present, and spatially from northern to southern mainland China and Taiwan, this book highlights the varied approaches that archaeologists and art historians use when attempting to reconstruct object trajectories. It also showcases the challenges they face, particularly with the unearthing of objects from archaeological contexts that, paradoxically, come to represent the earliest known point of their 'post-recovery lives'.

于薇著的《圣物制造与中古中国佛教舍利供养/考古新视野》是对公元5到9世纪中国佛教舍利供养活动及其遗物的专题研究。这一时期是佛教舍利信仰白中国初现并发展至顶峰的重要阶段，创造了无可比拟的物质遗存、视觉文化及宗教景观。借助于神圣的盛放容器，及沟通宗教与政治空间的舍利展示与迎 送仪式，“佛陀舍利”最终于8世纪初在中国成为至高权力的象征。
以中古时期舍利供养对舍利神圣性的构建及想象为中心，本项研究综合考古学、美术史、宗教史、政治史等研究方法，从以下三个层面回应以往讨论。首先，在空间上，始终参照印度及中亚地区舍利供养所代表的异域传统，具体考察每个时代对其不同的回应方式，以此深入思考舍利供养的“中国化”过程；其次，在时间上，关注舍利供养活动从南北朝出现至唐代发展至顶峰这一完整过程，侧重分析各个时期舍利供养活动的联系及改变；最后，在观念层面，以舍利的“瘗藏”与“示现”为主题，尤为强调它与墓葬传统中身体观念的不同之处，即对舍利的展示、分配，迎送的隆重仪式，以及仪式背后的政治文化历史语境。
全书旨在对佛教舍利供养“中国化”的发展过程进行反思，力图呈现其在中古政治历史文化语境中的原貌，揭示宗教圣物制造过程中物质与视觉媒介发挥作用的具体过程，实现更为广阔的视野下艺术、宗教与历史的多维度综合研究。

本书共分为六章，分别为设计制度研究所指、设计制度的文本印象、宋个案：法式看详、明个案：格古复礼、清个案：恭造之式、将然，已然：中国古代设计制度的情境逻辑。最后将“器以藏礼，政治大节”作为中国古代设计制度的内在逻辑，尝试分析当代社会语境中，再建设计制度的条件与途径。

本书收录了作者关于敦煌学研究的学术论文20余篇，介绍了敦煌学的发展演变及特点、日本对敦煌佛教文献之研究现况等。其中，尤其详细介绍了敦煌遗书的流散、回归、保护、时限和形态等情况以及其在佛教研究方面所发挥的作用等，对敦煌宗教文献等内容和价值分别进行了介绍，同时也阐述了敦煌遗书中的佛教文献及价值。另外，作者在书中还提出了关于“敦煌遗书库”的构想。