Kyoto: An Urban History of Japan’s Premodern Capital (University of Hawai'i Press, 2014) explores Kyoto’s urban landscape across eight centuries, beginning with the city’s foundation in 794 and concluding at the dawn of the early modern era in about 1600. Richly illustrated with original maps and diagrams, this panoramic examination of space and architecture narrates a history of Japan’s premodern capital in a way useful to students and scholars of institutional history, material culture, art history, religion, and urban planning. Japan specialists are introduced to new ways of thinking about old historical problems while readers interested more broadly in the architecture and urban planning of East Asia benefit from a novel approach that synthesizes textual, pictorial, and archeological sources.
The author, Matthew Stavros, is an historian of Japan at the University of Sydney.
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