“How to Do Everything Right” traces the rise of practical, daily-use guides and the conceptions of “ordinary” or “common” knowledge that they purveyed over the course of the early modern period, specifically from the late sixteenth through the early nineteenth century. These works included the popular household encyclopedias of the late Ming, the equally popular ritual handbooks of the high Qing, as well as the “cure yourself” medical and prescription manuals, geomantic handbooks, and fortune-telling guides that proliferated during the commercial publishing boom of the time. By examining the changing contents and contexts for the publication of these works, the project considers the sources of the new respectability they claimed for mundane knowledge (much maligned in elite Confucian thought) and the value they placed on social autonomy. Additionally, it investigates the ways in which the definition of “daily-use” knowledge changes over time, in correlation with larger social and intellectual orientations.
Through study of the changing paratextual strategies and formats employed by commercial publishers to market the texts, “How to Do Everything Right” explores what can be learned about their intended audiences and the reading practices of these “common readers.” In sum, it applies the methods of book history to study the expanding definition of knowledge and its uses in the early modern period and the role that commercial publishers played in developing a notion of socially sanctioned common knowledge—that is, of knowledge that, as many household encyclopedias put it, “one should be ashamed to have to ask others.”