Octavia Elfrida Saunders Memorial Lecture 2026: Craig Clunas Painting the learned woman in Ming China

This year's Octavia Elfrida Saunders Memorial Lecture will be given by Professor Craig Clunas.

In the official rhetoric of imperial China's male elite, the figure of the educated woman was deeply problematic. On the one hand, Confucian dogma held that women were to be bound by the practice of ‘three obediences': to fathers, to husbands, to sons. In this patriarchal scheme of things, the lack of learning in a woman was equated to her virtue. But in actual practice, the Ming period (1368 to 1644) inherited a long tradition of female writers, and women of the upper classes were almost invariably literate.

Women of the imperial family could be celebrated as authors, while a rare fragment of evidence point to one empress's role as learned practitioner of esoteric religious ritual. The situation was further complicated by the presence in urban centres of highly-educated courtesans, female entertainers of upper-class men, who were expected to be able to match them in appreciation of the arts of poetry, calligraphy and painting.

As well as looking at a range of images of and by educated women, this lecture will focus on a particular moment in the mid-Ming when a small cluster of unique images foregrounds the complexities surrounding female learning, and the key role of women's agency in the transmission of one central portion of the classical canon.

A reception will follow in the Old Union Diner.

Image caption: Tang Yin (1470-1523), Tao Gu Presents a Poem (detail). National Palace Museum, Taipei