Rewriting Knowledge of This Realm: Astronomy, Fujiwara no Michinori’s Intellectual and Political Networks, and the Honcho� Seiki Chronicle

When Fujiwara no Michinori was dug up and beheaded in 1159, one of the more remarkable and controversial careers of 12^th-century Japan was brought to a close. Michinori—also known by his Buddhist name Shinzei—had been one of the more successful members of a close-knit group of much-resented Sinophile reformers and renaissance intellectuals at the late Heian court. Michinori authored poems, legal textbooks, works of history, and is also credited with the first Japanese-authored work on mathematics, a commentary on the I Ching.

Yet Michinori’s primary work of history, the Honchō seiki chronicle (“Reigns of Our Court,” c. 1155), has been largely divorced from its eccentric author. While the officially-compiled Six National Histories of Japan (8^th-9^th centuries) have been recently re-read and analyzed to show how they were put together, and to recover the suppressed counter-histories therein, the “privately selected chronicles” of the 11^th and 12^th century, of which the Honchō seiki is the last, have not yet received such treatment. Such a study is long overdue.

This paper examines intellectual disputes as depicted in the Honchō seiki in conjunction with third-person accounts of Michinori’s own positions in these and similar disputes, to show how the intellectual networks that Michinori belonged to shaped not his work. In particular, Michinori’s interventions in matters of astronomy reveal how Michinori’s personal networks shaped his perception of right knowledge, and that perception shaped the epistemology presented in the Honchō seiki chronicle. This paper will present Michinori’s historiographic project as the result of a social restructuring of the Japanese court and of a resultant unease over professionalizing fields of expertise; it will reveal a sharp contrast between the motives behind Michinori’s historiography and the professionalization of history in the modern world.