Throughout a period of thirty years, Bol has published three major studies of Neo-Confucianism, more precisely focused on Daoxue, or the “Learning of the Way.” Although he does not explicitly frame these three works as sequential, the intellectual trajectory appears obvious. The book under review is the third in this trilogy. As the title indicates, it is a study of the “localization” of learning in one prefecture from the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries. The first book, “This Culture of Ours”: Intellectual Transitions in T’ang and Sung China (Stanford, 1992), traced the re-definition of both culture and learning as literati social and political identity was transformed between the eighth and eleventh centuries. Neo-Confucianism in History (Cambridge, Mass., 2008) sought to historicize Neo-Confucianism by embedding ideas and thinkers in their changing social and political contexts between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries.
Localizing Learning builds on the themes of the earlier...