The Origins of Japan’s Medieval World : Courtiers, Clerics, Warriors, and Peasants in the Fourteenth Century

This pioneering collection of fifteen essays proposes to change the way we think about fourteenth-century Japan and what preceded and followed it.

Most notable is the search for Japan's medieval beginnings, which are found not in the developments flowing from the establishment of the first shogunate in the 1180s, but rather in the shogunates collapse 150 years later.

In this admittedly controversial interpretation, the Kamakura age becomes the final episode in Japan's late classical period, with the courtier and warrior regimes of that era together seeking to maintain the traditional order.

But under the leadership of Japan s first truly medieval men (the emperor Go-Daigo and Ashikaga Takauji), the old order was dramatically transformed.

In the editor s words, the rules changed, new behavior was everywhere, the past was only one of several competing influences.

After the better part of a millennium, the spell cast by courtiers was finally broken.