How to read a chronicle

Abstract

Traditional historical chronicles from island Southeast Asia are crucial sources for our understanding of the region’s pre-modern history. These chronicles were produced in contexts of textual practice that are unfamiliar to modern historians, which can result in erroneous interpretations of their historical meaning. In this article, I present a method for reading the region’s chronicles that treats them as conglomerate texts, which consist of fragments of earlier texts that have been combined into new wholes. I illustrate the usefulness of this interpretive approach by examining the Pararaton, one of the main sources for the history of the late medieval kingdom of Java with its capital at Majapahit. The key findings of this article are a revised textual history of the Pararaton, new data from six unpublished manuscripts of the text, and a re-evaluation of the dynastic chronology of the Javanese kingdom between 1389 and 1429. These findings show that reading chronicles as conglomerate texts not only sheds light on their textual evolution, but also improves our understanding of the historical realities they refer to.

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