At the heart of this dissertation lie two political events that hitherto have predominantly been interpreted from the perspective of the xining reform and the factional disputes that accompanied it: the so called qingli reform (1043-1045), and a ritual debate (puyi 1064-1066). One goal of this work is to assess these on their own merits, and in this way gain new insights for our understanding of Wang Anshi's failure to maintain literati consensus in the xining-period, and the nature of 11th-century socio-political associations, or factions, in general. A considerable number of counterexamples cast doubt on views that interpret opposing factions as the manifestation of pre-existing, intellectual or social structures, with firm boundaries between groups prior to the actual dispute. Instead, our discussion of said political events, and the social relationships of actors at the time showed that there were ample connections between leading figures both in the 1030s and '40s, and prior to the puyi and xining disputes. It turned out that in both periods literati networks were much more diverse and ambiguous than the later disputes would suggest, but there was one crucial difference: earlier, literati had been much more likely to reestablish working relationships with erstwhile opponents and their networks, whereas such mending of fences appeared almost impossible in the latter half of the 11th century. To explain the difference from an intellectual perspective, we have turned to an interpretation of ritual offered by Seligman et al., which due to its bearing on social relationships is pertinent to the question at hand. Drawing on a diversity of texts about ritual, as well as the actions and positions taken during the two political events, we argue that views of ritual changed during the period in question: whereas the qingli protagonists had taken ritual on its own terms, and in this way made social ritual usable to keep up and reestablish relationships through intellectual disagreements and political defeat, important later figures relegated ritual to being a part of their larger visions of integrated orders, and as a consequence it lost the mitigating potential it had had earlier. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

The cultural accomplishments of the Northern Song dynasty are unrivalled in Chinese history. Song literati were particularly enthusiastic about calligraphy and writing materials, and the scale of their engagement in the art of writing exceeded that of both former and later dynasties, leaving plentiful legacies of calligraphic culture for later generations to study and appreciate. However, most modern studies emphasize the transmission of calligraphic culture from the Tang to Song and neglect the dynamics of disconnection and transformation between these two dynasties. By demonstrating how the technologies of brush, paper, ink cake, ink stone, and chair and desk (the "materiality" of calligraphy) shaped the look of calligraphy, this dissertation proposes an alternative understanding of the nature of Song innovations in the art of writing. Insofar as these innovations reconfigured the subsequent history of Sinitic calligraphy (calligraphic traditions based on Chinese characters), this dissertation argues that we cannot understand the art of writing without exploring the technology of writing. Through this study, I present the processes by which the literati of Northern Song traced, received, and modified the calligraphic culture of the past in creating their own Northern Song culture. Because of cultural discontinuity and transformation, what they ultimately reconstructed served as the foundation for their own culture, and has become the basis for how we think of the pre-Song past.