L. Butler
welcome and understudied topic. And finally, this is a book that attempts to radically reinterpret
the court (and indeed the whole of the fourteenth century)—though ironically that reinterpreta-
tion does little to force us to rethink the imperial institution more broadly since it presents these
developments as a sharp disjuncture from what preceded and followed.
In From Sovereign to Symbol, Conlan portrays a court not in eclipse (as commonly interpreted)
but instead at the center of the most important debates and developments of the era. At the fore
were questions of sovereignty and political authority, matters which encompassed both court
and warriors. The key figures in these developments were Shingon Buddhist monks such as
Kenshun and Kōzei, imperial advisors who came to dominate the court as “masters of ritual.”
Their influence, however, did not stop at the boundaries of the court, and it was not merely
symbolic or intellectual. Indeed, the ritual order these men created “determined the parameters
of politics and the process of change in fourteenth and fifteenth century Japan.”^24 What Conlan
asks us to believe, as summed up in the book’s subtitle, is that the historical complexities of the
age were subsumed within the wake of “ritual determinism.”^25
These are large claims, and more than a few historians have disputed them.^26 On the one hand,
Mikael Adolphson contends that Conlan’s argument is compromised by his failure to consider
the issues holistically, leading him to “selectively use and over- emphasize evidence in favor of the
new narrative,”^27 something reflected in Conlan’s dismissal of Zen Buddhism’s well- documented
significance as well as his decision to ignore the impetus for change effected by warriors. On the
other hand, Brian Ruppert argues that
there simply is no evidence that ritual itself changed dramatically in the period—the efforts
of figures like Monkan and then Kenshun seem to have simply been those of monks who
took advantage of their ritual knowledge to ingratiate themselves with elites.^28And it is true that Conlan offers very little discussion of the rituals themselves or why and in what
ways they were recognized by emperors and others as particularly powerful at this time. Despite
Conlan’s repeated assertions that “Shingon Buddhist ritual became the language of power itself,”
or that ritual was “the very essence of power,” convincing evidence for that is thin.^29
As provocative as From Sovereign to Symbol is, few historians will be comfortable with an argu-
ment that ascribes to ritual the extensive powers and influence (let alone “deterministic” pull)
Conlan claims it to have had in the fourteenth century. That certain emperors were under the
sway of monks and their secret rituals is not difficult to imagine, but to show that ritual changed
the course of history and took precedence over matters military and economic, for example, is
another matter.
For future research
In the preface to his Japan to 1600, William Wayne Farris states that “sources are plentiful for
Japan to 1600, perhaps even more so than for medieval Europe.” Farris does not say what he bases
this upon, but it seems a reasonable claim, since primary material on medieval Japan is certainly
abundant, even for periods like sengoku, which saw the destruction of more than a few large
written collections (such as those of Enryakuji at Mt. Hiei) along with institutions that produced
and housed them. Of course, the sources do not always speak to the questions historians ask, nor
are they rich for all topics, such as the lives of common people—but this is assuredly not a problem
for research on the court and its members. Moreover, in contrast to forty or fifty years ago, the
number of documents and diaries that have been transcribed and published has expanded dra-
matically, making sources much more accessible than in the past. Now one can easily find printed