Latest / New Books in Biography & Memoir
Christopher Lovins, "King Chŏngjo: An Enlightened Despot in Early Modern Korea" (SUNY Press, 2019)
Though traditionally regarded as a monarch who failed to arrest the gradual decline of his kingdom, the Korean king Chŏngjo has benefited in recent decades from a wave of new scholarship which has reassessed both his reign and his role in Korean history. The latest to do so is Christopher Lovins, who in his book King Chŏngjo: An Enlightened Despot in Early Modern Korea (State University of New York Press 2019) explains how as king Chŏngjo governed not as a weak ruler but as an absolute monarch. Lovins situates this within modern definitions of absolutism, showing how their conceptualizations…
The skinny
The skinny isn't ready yet — notes appear once the transcript is processed.