Court women as understood in Sejarah Melayu during the 1400s

• Main Author: Haney Khairunnisa Mohd Nor
• Other Authors: Andrea Nanetti
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2022
• Subjects: Humanities::History
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/155967
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This project aims to investigate the role and status of women in the Malay chronicle, ‘Sejarah Melayu’ aka ‘Genealogy of Kings’ or ‘Malay Annals’. This primary historical source, listed in the UNESCO Memory of the World program, is known as one of the finest classical Malay literature pieces and a milestone in the study of the history of Singapore. The content has been widely studied and interpreted differently by scholars. However, we do not have a critical edition of the work that considers the variants of all available manuscripts. Thus, it is difficult for scholars and the public to link the secondary literature to the source with philological accuracy and historical method. Therefore, starting from MS no. 18 of the Raffles Collection, in the library of the Royal Asiatic Society, London, and referring to the 1821 English translation by Leyden, the 1997 transcription by Muhammad Haji Salleh, and the 1896 Malay Annals Romanized edition by Shellabear; I will propose to use a method devised by Andrea Nanetti (2008) to develop a web-based application on Engineering Historical Memory, and compare, story by story, the manuscripts available through the Singapore National Library online portal (e.g., the Sejarah Melayu Accession number: Raffles Malay 18). The dissertation and the web application can be construed as an innovative contribution to Digital History in providing historical research with provenance and validation tools empowered by philological, historical, and computational methods.