IMC 2026: Sessions

This panel exploits a rich historical source—Chinese funerary biographies—to consider questions related to temporality in Medieval China. We hope to engage productively with medievalists of Europe and other places. Funerary biographies, usually composed of several hundred words, constituted an established literary genre by no later than the sixth century. Excavated in the tens of thousands in recent decades, they offer historians opportunities to reconsider China’s medieval period from a range of perspectives. The three members of this panel all examine the question of time, but do so in three different senses of the word. Nicolas Tackett (University of California, Berkeley) explores the timing of death and burial, and its epidemiological and ritual significance, using a dataset of several thousand dates culled from ninth-century funerary biographies. Tomoyasu Iiyama (Waseda University) assesses the changing memory of a past time, using twelfth- and thirteenth-century inscriptions to ascertain how the Early Medieval featured in narratives of family origin. Finally, Tianyu Shi (University of Hamburg) investigates how the passage of time and mode of readership affected commemorative practice, comparing the initial reception of a biography on stone with the later reception of the text preserved in an author’s collected works.