Description:
Silk Road studies has often treated material artifacts and manuscripts separately. This interdisciplinary volume expands the scope of transcultural transmission, questions what constituted a "book," and explores networks of circulation shared by material artifacts and manuscripts. Featuring new research in English by international scholars in Buddhist studies, art history, and literary studies, the essays in Beyond the Silk and Book Roads chart new and exciting directions in Silk Road studies.
Contributors are: Ge Jiyong, George A. Keyworth, Ding Li, Ryan Richard Overbey, Hao Chunwen, Wu Shaowei, Liu Yi, Lan Wu, Sha Wutian, Michelle C. Wang, and Stephen Roddy.
Brief description:
Michelle C. Wang is Associate Professor of Art and Art History at Georgetown University. A specialist in the Buddhist and silk road art of northwestern China, she has published on maṇḍalas, art and ritual, miracle tales, and text and image.
Ryan Richard Overbey serves as the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Assistant Professor of Buddhist Studies at Skidmore College and studies the intellectual and ritual history of Buddhism, with particular focus on early medieval Buddhist spells and ritual manuals.
Review Quotes: "(...) the articles in this beautifully illustrated book show that knowledge and materiality were closely intertwined in the movement of books and paintings across premodern Eurasia. Scholars will need to emulate contributors of this book in combining philological, historical, and art historical approaches if they intend to explore the full richness of the movements of things and ideas on the Silk/Book Road."
Xin Wen, Princeton University, Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies 10, no. 1 (2025): 259-262. https: //dx.doi.org/10.1353/mns.2025.a965567.
"This book represents a groundbreaking effort to reimagine the networks of exchange and material culture that have shaped human interactions across regions and civilizations. Through a collection of diverse research manuscripts contributed by leading scholars in the field, the book offers a comprehensive exploration of the intricate web of connections that transcended the traditional Silk Road and the transmission of texts along the Book Road." - Religious Studies Review (50/2 2024)