Record of the words and deeds of Yuhandang Sa-ssi

책 소개

Record of the Words and Deeds of Yuhandang Sa-ssi (Yuhandang Sa-ssi ŏnhaengnok) is the first English translation of a series of translations of old documents in the possession of Keimyung University Dongsan Library. This book contains anecdotes of the childhood, youth, middle age, and old age of the fictional female character Yuhandang Sa-ssi. The setting of the work is Ming dynasty China during the reign of the Wanli Emperor (萬曆, 1573–1620). The setting of novels in China was customary among Chosŏn dynasty novels. Yuhandang is a female fictional character, who would have been considered an ideal woman by the noble families of the Chosŏn dynasty. Yuhandang was born into a family that had revered Confucian learning from generation to generation and had an outstanding family tradition. Not only was she intelligent from an early age, but she also loved learning. After greeting her parents early every morning, she immersed herself in learning all day long. From the age of seven or eight, her academic level surpassed that of grown men, and by the time she was nine years old, when the anecdote of ‘wangyŏŏ’ (C. wangyuyu 王餘魚: king’s remaining fish) appeared, she had reached the point of being able to surpass any other scholar. After her marriage, she and her husband honor her parents-in-law with filial piety, perform ancestral rites with sincerity, and treat the servants with kindness and in this way garner praise from their relatives. She suggests to her husband that they should save money through frugality and in this way increase the family’s wealth and then use the increased wealth to establish a ‘righteous storehouse’, so that her parents-in-law could do charitable deeds. Through Yuhandang’s conversations with the people around her, the knowledge and methods that would have been necessary for the running of a yangban family, such as prenatal education and childcare, childbirth and hospitality, health care and disease prevention, as well as admonishments in words and deeds, are all explained in detail. Yuhandang directly teaches various Confucian texts and classics to her seven sons, grandsons and granddaughters, great-grandsons and great- granddaughters. Through anecdotes involving questions asked by her offspring and other relatives that are answered by Yuhandang, her erudite knowledge is clearly revealed. Nevertheless, Yuhandang repeatedly emphasizes that the purpose of study is to put into practice what has been studied, rather than just to learn for the sake of learning. In her old age, Yuhandang leads her granddaughters and grandsons’ wives and other members of her extended family on a tour of the family’s private garden Wanshu Garden (萬樹園) and Shuiyue Pavilion (水月亭), and on one occasion composes poetry at a family gathering. At the end of the work, Yuhandang’s eldest son Ilbong celebrates his sixtieth birthday. As both his grandfather Minister Tu and his father Tu Ch’ŏnbok are still alive, this is a rare occasion for the members of three generations to celebrate a sixtieth birthday together. The feast is attended by thousands of relatives, including over a thousand descendants of Minister Tu. The work concludes with Wi Ch’ŏn’gyŏng, the son-in-law of Minister Tu, writing ‘Preface to a Sixtieth Birthday Banquet’ (Su yŏn sŏ 壽宴序) to commemorate the blessings enjoyed by Minister Tu’s family. The author of Record of the Words and Deeds of Yuhandang Sa-ssi, which depicts the nobility’s view of an ideal woman Yuhandang in the Chosŏn dynasty, is still unknown. Regarding the genre to which this book belongs, scholarly opinions are divided among the genres of ‘ethics’, ‘question-andanswer encyclopedia’ and ‘women’s didactic novel’ (kyuhun sosŏl 閨訓小說). Further in-depth research on this point needs to be conducted in the future. Translating Professor Kim Dongwook’s modern Korean translation of Yuhandang Sa-ssi ŏnhaengnok and its abundant annotations into English, the translator could not help but be impressed not only by the erudite kno…

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