Review Women of the Kakawin World, Marriage and Sexuality in the Indic Courts of Java and Bali
Women of the Kakawin World is a historical study of the experiences of women, in particular royal women and their associates, in the courts of pre-Islamic Java and early modern Bali. Creese draws upon her background in philology to examine the corpus of epic kakawin (poems written in Old Javanese in verse) that were composed in those courtly centers over a millennium, as they provide rich insights about the lives of women that are not available from other sources. With its interest in the representations of women, the book makes a valuable contribution to gender studies in Indonesia, the more so since it is focused heavily on the contemporary period. It is also an important study of the social institutions of courtship and marriage. Finally, although this is not the book's main intention, it contributes to knowledge of the kakawin genre by analyzing kakawin from a new perspective.
https://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/54386
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