March 13, 2020
Dr Dick van der Meij, DREAMSEA’s Academic Advisor and Liaison Officer was invited to deliver a lecture during the International Symposium on Royal Attire and Civilization at the Royal Ambarrukmo Hotel in Yogyakarta from 9-10 March 2020. He delivered his lecture entitled “Illustrated Manuscripts from Yogyakarta and the Attire the Figures on the Illustrations Wear” on 9 March. He presented some of the results and the questions that came up during his philological investigation of the figures and their attire as found in illustrations in a number of manuscripts from Central Java preserved in collections in Berlin and Leiden. At […]
February 11, 2020
Jakarta, DREAMSEA – At present, digitised pages of manuscripts from a variety of Southeast Asian cultures have been made available online. The public can read these digital manuscripts on the Open Access website https://dreamsea.co after clicking on REPOSITORY menu. The digitised manuscripts and the Open Access website have been made available by the program Digital Repository of Endangered and Affected Manuscripts in Southeast Asia (DREAMSEA). In this first stage, high resolution images of 593 manuscripts containing 20,129 pages have been made available along with the metadata. They originate from three different collections. The first part is the legacy of the […]
February 6, 2020
Many libraries in the world preserve Javanese pawukonmanuscripts containing divinatory calendars based on the Javanese 30 seven-day wukucycle. Collections are found in the National Library of Indonesia in Jakarta, the University of Indonesia in Depok, the royal palaces of Yogyakarta and Surakarta in Central Java, the Museum Sonobudoyo in Yogyakarta, Leiden University Library in the Netherlands, the British Library in London and the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin in Germany, to name some of them. A number of pawukonmanuscripts are illustrated and form the topic of this contribution. Read More
February 6, 2020
Manuscripts are not only about content. The leather bindings, the kinds of paper, and the ink used may tell us stories without words – material talks. Dr. Dick van der Meij will introduce us to some Javanese manuscripts In 2015, the Leiden University Libraries received a very special gift from Prof. Merle Ricklefs, who donated seven Javanese manuscripts to the library (Cod.Or. 27.087 – 27.093). Prior to this donation he had already donated the extraordinary Serat Pustakaraja (D Or. 661) to the KITLV library, now part of the UB Leiden. These eight manuscripts form a most magnificent collection on Javanese […]
February 6, 2020
I Today’s guest blog, highlighting one of the most important Javanese manuscripts from Yogyakartawhich has just been digitised, is by Dr Dick van der Meij from Hamburg University’s DREAMSEAproject which digitises endangered manuscripts in Southeast Asia. Javanese texts are generally written in a non-rhyming poetic form called tembang macapat. Within each metre, verses consist of stanzas with a fixed number of lines, a fixed number of syllables per line, and a fixed vowel in the last syllable of each line. There are about 30 different metres, some of which are short and have only four lines per stanza, while others […]
February 6, 2020
In 1927, J.C.F. von Mühlen, the private secretary of Prince Hendrik, the husband of Queen Wilhelmina, donated a beautiful manuscript of the Dewa Ruci to their daughter, Princess Juliana of the Netherlands, now preserved in the Royal Collections, The Hague. The manuscript was written in Yogyakarta, one of the four principalities in colonial central Java, in the Javanese year 1834, corresponding to AD 1904. According to the information given at the beginning of the manuscript, it was not made for Princess Juliana but rather for Crown-Prince Kangjeng Gusti Pangeran Adipati Anom Mengkunegara Sudibya (1879-1913), son of Hamengkubuwana VII, the Sultan […]