I tracked down the Cambridge you suggested, and found the essays related to the time period... and well, that's history essay for you. So dry! But still informative for background (and the maps helped, thank you).
I've searched through anime (still digging through scanlated manga), and Nobunaga almost always comes off as the bad guy, the one exception being Sengoku Strays, which takes its own liberties with history. What I didn't know at all was that feminist scholarship has influenced the non-Japanese study of that time period. Not sure I should be surprised, being familiar with the thesis that wartime has always expanded the rights and roles of minorities (a major text on women's roles during the English Civil War being my first introduction to that argument), so it seems reasonable that a hundred years of war in Japan might've done the same for women, farmers, foreigners, religious folk, and so on.
Guess I just need to mark Taiko (the extended, if somewhat speculative, but heavily researched, biography on Toyotomi Hideyoshi) and get myself a copy. Hardback or not.
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Date: 13 Mar 2012 03:12 pm (UTC)I've searched through anime (still digging through scanlated manga), and Nobunaga almost always comes off as the bad guy, the one exception being Sengoku Strays, which takes its own liberties with history. What I didn't know at all was that feminist scholarship has influenced the non-Japanese study of that time period. Not sure I should be surprised, being familiar with the thesis that wartime has always expanded the rights and roles of minorities (a major text on women's roles during the English Civil War being my first introduction to that argument), so it seems reasonable that a hundred years of war in Japan might've done the same for women, farmers, foreigners, religious folk, and so on.
Guess I just need to mark Taiko (the extended, if somewhat speculative, but heavily researched, biography on Toyotomi Hideyoshi) and get myself a copy. Hardback or not.