'Rivers and lakes' — I bet that's 'jianghu' in the original text.
"I couldn’t stand it, so I decided that we would eat no more than one meat dish per meal and dress in no more than one colored garment at a time. I wore no pearls or feathers in my hair and kept no gilded or embroidered article in my household." — I assume they were spending all their money on books/storing and maintaining their collection? Would be super helpful if the editors had included the original Chinese text for these quotations.
"reflecting contemporary Ming notions of a “talented scholar and beauty” (caizi jiaren 才子佳人) match." — yeah, that only works if Li Qingzhao was the caizi, and Zhao Mingcheng the jiaren.
Re: Introduction
More about their research/archival process in this entry on Zhao Mingcheng here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhao_Mingcheng
'Rivers and lakes' — I bet that's 'jianghu' in the original text.
"I couldn’t stand it, so I decided that we would eat no more than one meat dish per meal and dress in no more than one colored garment at a time. I wore no pearls or feathers in my hair and kept no gilded or embroidered article in my household." — I assume they were spending all their money on books/storing and maintaining their collection? Would be super helpful if the editors had included the original Chinese text for these quotations.
"reflecting contemporary Ming notions of a “talented scholar and beauty” (caizi jiaren 才子佳人) match." — yeah, that only works if Li Qingzhao was the caizi, and Zhao Mingcheng the jiaren.
"There is a long-standing and seldom examined tradition of reading all of Li Qingzhao’s song lyrics as unmitigated expressions of her life and feelings." — there's sometimes an inverse thing happening with the interpretation of male ci writers' pieces. E.g. Xin Qiji's Green Jade Table, ostensibly about running into a hot girl at a Lantern Festival, is typically read as a commentary on the state of society (see https://londonjournalspress.com/on-the-english-translation-of-song-ci-poetry-under-the-three-level-poetry-translation-criteria-a-case-study-of-green-jade-table-lantern-festival)