· March 2010
· ISBN 978 90 04 18325 4
· Hardback (xvi, 484 pp.)
· List price EUR 158.- / US$ 224.-
· Brill’s Korean Studies Library; 1

This book offers no less than a radically different view of the Koryŏ state. Until now scholarship failed to recognize the complicated historical descent, byzantine international relations and multiple incommensurable worldviews of the early Korean Koryŏ state (918-1170). Instead, it subjected these to reductionist categories favouring reified particulars over broader views. Asking how Koryŏ meaningfully dealt with its environment, Remco Breuker rejects the reduction of Koryŏ intellectual abundance to analytical categories, and emphasizes the functional importance of Koryŏs pluralism in allowing the notion that realities were scattered, inconsistent and plural. Here is a convincing argument that Koryŏs pluralism decisively contributed to the formation of a region-transcending communal identity that enabled Koryŏ to engage in a civilizational competition with neighbouring Chinese and Manchurian states, while maintaining a dynamic but stable society domestically.

Readership: All those interested in Korean history, intellectual history, identity formation, pluralism, region-transcending communities, nation formation and the history of international relations in East Asia, as well as medievalists and philologists.

Remco E. Breuker, Ph.D. (2006) in Korean History, Leiden University, works on medieval Korean and Northeast Asian history and historiography. He has published extensively on Koryŏ history including Forging the Truth: Creative Deception and National Identity in Medieval Korea (2009).