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A number of scholars have studied the cult of widow chastity in Ming and Qing China. Weijing Lu has made an important contribution to that scholarship by focusing on the cult of the faithful maiden, those betrothed women whose fiancés died before marriage but who nevertheless maintained lifelong chastity or in some cases committed suicide to join their "husbands" in death. Lu challenges the assumptions of many modern Chinese scholars who saw faithful maidens as unwitting victims of oppressive Confucian ideology. Instead, she argues that faithful maidens were active agents of their own fate, using Confucian ideals to assert their own values against their natal families and their in-laws, and in doing so, helped shape the intellectual agenda of Ming-Qing Confucian male scholars. Her point is well taken, though self-denial and self-destruction are, it might be added, relatively constrained forms of agency.
In more detail than anyone heretofore, Lu explores the cultural, political, and social contexts in which the faithful maiden cult took shape in the late Ming and early Qing periods. She highlights the importance of "Confucian honors accorded to moral behavior, the cultural glorification of extraordinary deeds, the beliefs in an afterlife and destiny...