September 23, 2022
Morgan Pitelka, recipient of the Bernard L. Herman Distinguished Professorship, has recently published two new books! You can read about them below:
Morgan Pitelka, Reiko Tanimura, and Takashi Masuda. Letters from Japan’s Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: The Correspondence of Warlords, Tea Masters, Zen Priests, and Aristocrats. Institute for East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley, 2021. In this book, historians Morgan Pitelka and Reiko Tanimura teamed up with one of the premier experts in calligraphy in Japan, Takashi Masuda, to translate, analyze, and explain twenty-three letters from one of the most fascinating periods in Japanese history: the transition from medieval to early modern.
Morgan Pitelka. Reading Medieval Ruins: Urban Life and Destruction in Sixteenth-Century Japan. Cambridge University Press, 2022. The Japanese provincial city of Ichijōdani was destroyed in the civil wars of the late sixteenth century but never rebuilt. Archaeological excavations have since uncovered the most detailed late medieval urban site in the country. Drawing on analysis of specific excavated objects and decades of archaeological evidence to study daily life in Ichijōdani, Reading Medieval Ruins illuminates the city’s layout, the possessions and houses of its residents, its politics and experience of war, and religious and cultural networks.
