‘조선시대 科試 연구’의 성과와 의의

초록

This article aims to comprehensively review the achievements of the research project “Construction of a Database of Materials on ‘Civil Service Examinations in the Joseon Dynasty’ and a Historical Study of Changes in Rhetorical Styles and Modes of Logical Construction,” supported by the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Institute Support Program of the National Research Foundation of Korea and conducted in two phases from 2019 to 2022 and from 2022 to 2025. It also seeks to assess the significance of the project and to explore future research tasks. Recognizing the limitations of previous studies, which tended to focus primarily on the institutional system and administration of the civil service examinations, our research team sought to overcome these constraints. In the first phase, we catalogued materials related to Joseon-period civil service examinations (gwasi, 科試) and constructed them into a database. In the second phase, while continuing to enhance the database, we published a total of twenty-one volumes in the Series on Civil Service Examinations, specializing in three areas: research, source materials, and translation. Through these efforts, we were able to identify diverse aspects of Joseon civil service examinations and illuminate their scholarly significance. The six volumes in the research series examine, from multiple perspectives, such topics as the cultural influence of examination writings, interpretations of the Four Books, the intellectual-historical significance of examination prose, the genres of Korean examination writing, and the literature of governance produced through royal examination responses and literary composition. The source-material series consists of ten facsimile volumes, for which eighteen rare and exemplary texts centered on the six genres of examination writings were carefully selected from the civil service examination materials held by the Korea University Library and accompanied by detailed bibliographical introductions. This series provides a research infrastructure distinguished by both rarity and empirical value. The five volumes in the translation series offer meticulous annotated translations of legal codes related to the civil service examinations, Chinese studies of examination literary styles, and Dongguk jangwonchaek, an anthology of top-ranking palace examination policy essays from the early Joseon period. These translations expand both the theoretical foundation and the scholarly scope of research in this field. The achievements of this research project are significant in that they systematize the distinctive stylistic forms of Joseon civil service examinations, differentiated from those of China, thereby highlighting the subjectivity of Korean classical Chinese literature. They also broaden the horizon for understanding the intellectual history of the Joseon dynasty by examining the civil service examination system from the multidimensional perspective of the “production and circulation of knowledge.” As future tasks, this article proposes the development of interdisciplinary research, the qualitative and quantitative expansion of comparative studies on civil service examination systems within the East Asian cultural sphere, the continued discovery of unpublished and rare civil service examination materials, the further enhancement of the database, and subsequent annotated translations of civil service examination materials.

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