This article investigates the growth of cross-border movement and migration in the northern portion of the Yellow Sea during the sixteenth century, which generated ongoing interactions and tensions with the coastal governance of Chosŏn Korea and Ming China. The fluid flow of private seafarers reconnected the northern Yellow Sea and revitalised its maritime economy, making this space an integral part of wider trade networks. Meanwhile, the Chosŏn and Ming authorities also attempted to discern, categorise, and institutionalise this transmarine mobility in their discursive, administrative, and geographic spaces. Instead of considering the two polities as land based and inward looking, this article foregrounds the dynamics of their coastal control mechanisms, while at the same time paying close attention to their constraints on filtering and scrutinising maritime violence.

As existing scholarship demonstrates, although the Chosŏn state (1392–1910) aimed to be a society “without litigation,” people understood the use of law and employed it to resolve various disputes in the local community. At the same time, a plethora of legal cases reveal that many parties chose alternative ways of airing their grievances rather than going directly to the local court. Centered on the eighteenth-century litigation over a case of attempted rape, this article examines the complex, multifaceted factors that influenced people's use of different strategies to appeal their justice at the local level. It asks what resources ordinary people in the late Chosŏn had in navigating legal conflicts, how they strategized over the choices they had, and why they finally exercised particular options when trying to win their cases. Investigating these questions, this article not only offers insights into the meaning of litigation that entailed strenuous document preparation to inscribe grievance, but also probes the impulses of individual actors in the legal terrain when attempting to achieve their goals through the dynamics of social interactions and existing resources in eighteenth-century Korea.

This paper examines the transnational literary interactions in the early modern Sinographic sphere by examining the late Chosŏn writer Yi Tŏngmu's reading of an early Qing text, Liuxi Waizhuan, and its resonance in his compilation of Noeroe Nangnak Sŏ. Reconsidering the unmediated communicability of the Sinographic text, it demonstrates the ways in which Noeroe Nangnak Sŏ decoupled Liuxi Waizhuan from its local conditions of production and circulation and relocalized it to fit Chosŏn Korea's agenda of repositioning itself in the changing Sinocentric order after the downfall of the Ming. Between delocalizing and relocalizing the Sinographic text, the compilation of Noeroe Nangnak Sŏ participated in the constantly shifting meanings of loyalty to the fallen Ming, thereby diversifying the repertoire of the shared civilization in early modern East Asia.

This article explains why the Chosŏn government and the military in particular expanded state control over forests in the seventeenth century and analyzes the implications of forest administration in a preindustrial polity. From 1592 to 1598, the Chosŏn dynasty suffered invasions from Japan that displaced much of the Korean population and devastated the economy and environment. The crucial role of the navy during the war, along with a dire postwar situation, heightened government anxieties about deforestation and timber scarcity. Thus, in the seventeenth century, the Chosŏn government expanded administration over forests, particularly pine forests, across the coasts and islands of southwestern Korea. The key vehicle for the expansion was the military. Due to wartime and postwar exigencies, the military became the late Chosŏn state's primary organ for management of wood resources for state purposes. Furthermore, the growth of pine-centric state forests and shifts in military priorities would significantly reshape Korean ecologies.

Men's references to women's writing in vernacular Korean script never term this practice “calligraphy,” and yet articles of women's intricate brushwork reveal that in late Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910) this was a highly aestheticized practice with recognized social importance and a meticulous training process. This article captures the moment when vernacular Korean scriptural practices ascended the elite canon, which resulted in the emergence of high vernacular culture. It historicizes the gendered logic of representation in a male-authored historical archive to uncover the contours of a women-centered vernacular aesthetic canon that assumed a status of prestige alongside male culture in literary Chinese. The article unravels the meaning of the term “calligraphy” when it is applied to women's vernacular handwriting and ponders the connection between women's bodily discipline, productive work, and exquisite vernacular brushwork. This opens an alternative perspective not only on the gender politics of the Chosŏn society but also on the culture of the time, which is hitherto seen as dominated by a male-centered literary Chinese canon.