For more than a century scholars of central and western mainland Southeast Asia have sought to characterise the status of dhammasattha — the predominant genre of written law from the region before colonialism — and define its authority vis-à-vis Pali Buddhism. For some, dhammasattha texts represent a predominantly ‘secular’ or ‘customary’ tradition, while for others they are seen as largely commensurate with, if not directly derived from, the religio-political ideas of a cosmopolitan and purportedly canonical ‘Theravāda’. However, scholarship has yet to investigate the way that regional authors during the late premodern period themselves understood the character and legitimacy of written law. The present article examines seventeenth through nineteenth-century Burmese narratives concerning the genealogy and status of dhammasattha to advance a pluralist conception of the relationship between law and religion in Southeast Asian history. This analysis addresses a historical context where ideas concerning Buddhist textual authority were in the process of development, and where there were multiple and competing discourses of legal ideology in play. For elite monastic critics closely connected with royalty, dhammasattha stood in problematic relation to authoritative taxonomies of scripture, and its jurisprudence was seen to contradict authorised accounts of the origin and nature of Buddhist law; the genre thus required reform to be brought into alignment with what were construed as orthodox legal imaginaries. The principal hermeneutic move these monastic commentators performed to achieve this involved redescribing dhammasattha in light of such accounts as a variety of Buddhist royal legislation and written law as the prerogative of the Buddhist state.

The world might have become, for the first time in human history, a majority urban place, but there are clearly important seams of research to mine in the Southeast Asian countryside. These six books amply show why there is a continuing interest in rural areas and agrarian living in the region.

For the past three decades, student movements in most countries in the world have been beaten back, but there are signs that some may be returning. In response to the Arab Spring, students participated fully in Tahrir Square and beyond. The student elections in Egypt that followed, however, seem to have been divided according to the various links that each student group had with the political groups contending for state power, like the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists on the one side, against secular and revolutionary groups on the other. It is not certain if the student elections really reflected the overall mood of the country or whether they were simply shaped by political protagonists outside the campuses.

Historians may have come late to the study of women and gender in Southeast Asia, but when these three books are placed along a historiographical spectrum one can only be impressed at how far the field has moved in approach and methodology. Exploiting previously untapped sources that emanate from very different sites — a Dutch East India Company courtroom, the women's quarters of a Malay palace, the privacy of a Javanese home — the authors open up new avenues by which to explore the complexity of Southeast Asia's gender history. Though the contexts are very different, the movement through time (Wives, slaves and concubines is set in the late eighteenth century, Victorious wives in the nineteenth, and Realizing the dream in the twentieth) provides an opportunity to gauge shifts in representations of ‘femaleness’, attitudes towards gender roles, and women's responses to change.