Publication New book by Bruno Shirley

Bruno Shirley has published his monograph, Religion, Gender, and Politics in Medieval Sri Lanka: The Reconstruction of Buddhist Kingship, ca. 1070–1215. 

The book is a critical reconsideration of Sri Lanka’s Poḷonnaruva period, in which religious reforms shaped the latter course of Buddhism across South and Southeast Asia. Despite this period’s significance, our understanding of it has been over-determined by a set of retrospective accounts written by male monastics, which focused on the heroic deeds of male monarchs.

This book offers a radical revision of this narrative. Drawing on textual, inscriptional, numismatic, and material evidence from within the period itself, it reveals how the intellectual and social histories of Buddhism, politics, and gender were inextricably intertwined in Poḷonnaruva. In particular, it argues that debates over what it meant to be a “good Buddhist king” were intrinsically debates about Buddhist masculinity and about the proper relationship of gender to power.

The book is available open access:
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