This book is a distinguished addition to a distinguished body of work and an important contribution to studies of the Ming period. By looking at Wen Zhengming’s calligraphy and painting as objects embedded in complex networks of obligation, patronage, and reciprocity, Craig Clunas provides richly detailed new perspectives on familiar events and questions of the period. Although good English-language studies of Wen have been done in the past, this one is a significant advance. It incorporates much recent scholarship in Chinese, including letters and other materials assembled by the contemporary scholar Zhou Daozhen that were not included in the official edition of Wen’s works. When recent scholarly theories of gift and exchange are brought to bear on these materials, they allow new ways of thinking about the artist, the work of art, and the social and ideological matrices that produce them. The starting point of Elegant Debts is the observation that modern sensibilities in the study of Chinese art have filtered out a great deal of what Wen’s contemporaries found significant in his life and work. By focusing on only a small portion of what he produced—his paintings and his official writings—we lose sight of the even greater value his...