Part 1

• The East Coast of the Malay peninsula as a centre for the Art of the Islamic Book Annabel Teh Gallop British Library

  It is well known that the finest Qur’an manuscripts in Southeast Asia were produced along the east coast of the Malay peninsula in the 19th century, centred on the kingdom of Terengganu, while smaller and less grandiose illuminated Qur’ans were created in the neighbouring states of Kelantan and Patani. Although around a hundred of these East Coat Qur’an manuscripts have been documented, fewer than five have colophons or any clear dates of creation. To try to clarify dates of production, this corpus will be considered alongside other non-Qur’anic manuscripts illuminated in similar styles. An attempt will be made to interrogate the stylistic categorisations of the ‘Terengganu’ and ‘Patani’ styles to see if hints of ‘hybridity’ may indicate manuscripts of a relatively early date. It is known that Terengganu Qur’ans were sought after by royal courts across the archipelago, and the impact of these de luxe Qur’an manuscripts on local production will also be considered.

• Coloured Lithographs in the Malay World, 1840-1920 Tiara Ulfah Universität Hamburg

  Research into lithography (cap batu) in the Malay world remains fragmented due to a lack of technical manuals and archival records regarding press locations or materials. However, a significant corpus of books, pamphlets, and ephemera surviving from 1840 to 1920 provides a window into these historical practices. By analysing this corpus through the lens of colour and its absence, these materials can serve as a point of reference for hypothesising their functions, productions, distributions, and audiences.
  This paper argues that colour is both a functional and a decorative element, tied directly to production, genre, and material conditions. In the mid-nineteenth century, early commercial lithography used chromolithographic techniques. These were intended to emulate the traditional illumination of Malay manuscripts, specifically their intricate frontispieces and frames, in non-religious texts. However, by the late nineteenth century, a shift toward commodification led to a decline in colour. To meet the demand for faster, cheaper production, printers used thinner substrates and monochrome palettes, as the multiple print runs required for colour became logistically and financially impractical.
  Despite this industrial streamlining, colour was not entirely abandoned; it was reconfigured. In single sheet prints like genealogical charts, colour was often applied manually via watercolours. In these instances, colour establishes visual hierarchies, distinguishing the names of significant figures through luminous, more vibrant, or glittery pigments as well as a direct semiotic extension of the text.
  By tracing these transitions from mechanical chromolithography to manual tinting and eventual monochrome dominance, this paper demonstrates how colour serves as a physical proxy for under-documented printing history. Ultimately, analysing the use of colour allows us to reconstruct the technical affordances and material constraints of the Malay lithographic culture, offering a clearer picture of its production, distribution, and consumption.

• Materiality and Textual Tendencies in Ulu Manuscripts of Southern Sumatra Tipo: Muhammad Haidar Izzuddin Universitas Indonesia

  The materiality of Ulu manuscripts from South Sumatra reveals a close relationship between writing surfaces, textual forms, and social functions within local manuscript culture. Rather than serving merely as passive carriers, materials such as kaghas (tree bark paper), gelumpai (bamboo strip), surat boloh (round bamboo), and buffalo horn actively shape how texts are produced, organized, and used.
  Based on philological analysis and field observations, this paper identifies recurring tendencies linking certain types of texts with particular materials. Magical texts, including mantras, rajah, and genealogies, are often found on kaghas; extended narrative and literary compositions frequently appear on bamboo (gelumpai); poetic forms such as rejung are commonly associated with surat boloh; while agreements and legal texts are often inscribed on more durable media such as animal horn. However, these associations are not rigid. A number of texts circulate across different materials, indicating flexibility in scribal practices and the adaptability of textual traditions to available resources and social contexts.
  This paper draws on an inventory of known Ulu manuscripts and compares their textual contents across different materials in order to identify both patterns and deviations. This comparative approach allows for a more nuanced understanding of how texts move between media and how material choices relate to function, context, and use. Attention to both pattern and variation suggests that Ulu manuscript culture operates through a dynamic interplay between material affordances and textual conventions.

Part 2

• Binding manuscripts in the 17th – 19th century Palembang: materials and decorative features Alan Darmawan SOAS University of London Jessica Rahardjo SOAS University of London/Oxford University

  Despite the growing scholarly interests in the material aspect of manuscript cultures in the past two decades, the attention to manuscript bookbinding from Indonesia has been very little. Scholars have been aware of the variety of the manuscript supporting materials and the way they are prepared, inscribed, stringed and/or bound, but research on this remained a mere background to textual traditions. Building on pioneering studies on bookbinding traditions in Indonesia (Plomp 1993) and island Southeast Asia (Gallop, forthcoming), this paper focuses on the art of binding in Palembang, South Sumatra. It scrutinises manuscripts in the form of codex, their covers and the materials they made of, binding structure and the techniques applied to bind quires. More specifically, decorative features like embossed floral motif will serve as evidence of various styles, which may indicate development and trends in certain historical periods. As the manuscripts from the 17th and 19th century Palembang indicate, the features of their binding suggest a consistent structure of a locally distinct and long-lasting craftmanship, while corresponding to the Islamic bookbinding.

• Khuṭba scrolls from Island Southeast Asia Jessica Rahardjo SOAS University of London and University of Oxford

  Recent digitisation initiatives, notably the Endangered Archives Programme and DREAMSEA, have brought to light a genre of Islamic manuscripts in Island Southeast Asia that is largely absent from European collections: the khuṭba (Gallop 2020). Khuṭbas are liturgical sermons delivered before the Friday congregational prayer, in celebration of the festivals of Īd al-Fiṭr and ʿĪd al-Aḍḥā, and on other special occasions. This paper examines a small but diverse corpus of khuṭba scrolls from regions including the highlands of West Sumatra and Kerinci, as well as Madura, Lombok, and Ambon. These scrolls are produced on paper or dluwang; some are stored in bamboo cylindrical containers, while others feature illumination and/or cloth headpieces (Gallop 2014).
  Studies of khuṭba as a medium of public discourse have tended to focus on sermons of renowned preachers and the political uses of preaching (Lambourn 2008, 2011). Scholarly neglect of the khuṭba has been attributed to ‘the modern scholarly preoccupation with content over a premodern valuation of form’ (Jones 2012). The scroll format – distinct from the codex more commonly associated with Islamic manuscript traditions in the region – invites a different analytical approach and way of ‘reading’. This paper foregrounds the material aspect of khuṭba scrolls, arguing that the format is central to the religious and performative significance of the sermon. By considering other texts in scroll format, both religious and non-religious such as azimat, genealogies, and Minangkabau surat cap, it also explores the broader contexts that may have shaped the development of khuṭba scrolls.

• The intertechnology of the early modern Philippine book, or The remarkable case of a seventeenth-century account on Christian martyrs in Japan Patricia May Jurilla University of the Philippines

  The printed book is a site of crossings––where materials, technologies, and techniques from various places and times come together in its production; where, in its reception, a reader engages with the information, ideas, or experiences presented by an author who may be from near or far, from the past or the present; and which acquires manifold material and conceptual meanings through the years of its survival. These intersections and interactions, which Mary Hammond and Robert Fraser refer to as the ‘intertechnology of the book’, are perhaps all the more evident in the colonial book, as it is a product shaped by transfers, adaptations, or appropriations of technology, political ideology, religious belief, language, and culture.
  This presentation will explore the intertechnology of the early modern Philippine book, specifically those printed in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries during the Spanish colonial period, by examining the case of an account on the martyrdom of Christian missionaries in Japan written in Spanish by a Franciscan friar and produced in Manila by a Filipino printer in 1625. It is a book that is both unique for the unusual circumstances it saw through its publication and reception, and typical for the route it took in its survival.

Show Paper Abstracts

Abstract

Keywords

• East Coast
• Islamic illumination
• Malay print culture
• Malay textual production
• Palembang
• Patani
• Qur'an manuscripts
• Southern Sumatra
• Terengganu
• Ulu manuscript
• binding
• decorative features
• lithography
• manuscripts
• materiality
• materials
• textual tendencies