Dr. Wiebke Denecke (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

This talk focuses on envoy poetry from early modern East Asia, in particular on Collections of Magnificent Flowers (Hwanghwajip), a large corpus of officially compiled poetry anthologies from the missions the Ming court sent to Chosŏn Korea between 1450 and 1633; and several 18th-century poetry collections from Korea’s t'ongsinsa missions to Japan. In cross-cultural perspective East Asia’s envoy poetry is a highly distinctive phenomenon: during their encounters envoys communicated in the scripta (rather than lingua) franca of Literary Sinitic through “brush talk” on paper; they were Confucian literati eager to display their talent in collective poetry composition on set topics and shared rhyme schemes; and they learnt how to play with a common set of themes and tropes to convey courtesy and conviviality.