This pioneering collection of fifteen essays proposes to change the way we think about fourteenth-century Japan and what preceded and followed it. Most notable is the search for Japan s medieval beginnings, which are found not in the developments flowing from the establishment of the first shogunate in the 1180 s, but rather in the shogunate s collapse 150 years later. In this admittedly controversial interpretation, the Kamakura age becomes the final episode in Japan s late classical period, with the courtier and warrior regimes of that era together seeking to maintain the traditional order. But under the leadership of Japan s first truly medieval men (the emperor Go-Daigo and Ashikaga Takauji), the old order was dramatically transformed. In the editor s words, the rules changed, new behavior was everywhere, the past was only one of several competing influences. After the better part of a millennium, the spell cast by courtiers was finally broken.