https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6673-7097
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Katherine L Alexander, Divine, Demonic, and Disordered: Women without Men in Song Dynasty China, By Hsiao-wen Cheng, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2025;, lfaf036, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfaf036
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Extract
Any attempt to summarize the striking, strange, and unsettling situations that Hsiao-wen Cheng introduces in her book about difficult women in Song dynasty (960–1279) China runs the risk of defining its scope so narrowly as to limit its audience to a small group of specialists only. Although I will nonetheless try to offer a summary of the book in this review, I must first point out that it has much to offer readers from fields not directly related to Song China or Chinese religious, medical, or gender history more broadly. Because of the provocative questions and insights Cheng makes in the book’s introduction, historians of other countries, eras, and fields will find food for thought in this work and may also wish to engage with the detailed, evocative case studies presented in the six chapters that follow.
Divine, Demonic, and Disordered is about nonconforming women in a society where options outside of the expected role of wife and mother were limited and where the available evidence about such women’s lives rarely gives straightforward answers about their nonconformance. From this book’s very first sentence, Cheng is clear about how little we know, not just in relation to women in Song China but women in general. Examining a subset of women whose actions were often beyond the comprehension of people in their own time highlights the limitations of our knowledge about women’s lives in history more broadly. Cheng does not promise that the diverse sources she draws on will get us any closer to certainty—not about women in the Song dynasty, Chinese medical or religious history, or anything really. Therein lies both the power of this book but also its potential to frustrate readers. The frustration, however, is necessary, and Cheng’s resistance to making grand claims or neat conclusions out of her complicated sources honors the limitations of the available materials while also revealing their richness. That there are few straight answers is in itself a valuable reminder to listen not just to what our sources say but also what they do not and cannot say (9–10). We have much to lose when the answers are too easy.
