Religion, Gender, and Politics in Medieval Sri Lanka

Dr. Shirley's monograph, Religion, Gender, and Politics in Medieval Sri Lanka: The Reconstruction of Buddhist Kingship, ca. 1070-1215 (ARC Humanities Press, 2026), is now available open access, thanks to the generous support of the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation. This book offers a radical reconsideration of the Poḷon-naruva period, long understood to be a turning point in the history of Theravāda Buddhism. Histories of this period have been overwhelmingly based on a series of literary accounts written long after the fact. But by drawing on textual, inscriptional, numismatic, and material evidence from within the period itself, the book reveals how the intellectual and social histories of Buddhism, politics, and gender were inextricably intertwined in Poḷon-naruva. In particular, it argues that debates over what it meant to be a “good Buddhist king” were intrinsically debates about Buddhist masculinity and about the proper relationship of gender to power.

Link to purchase/download the book here.

Bruno M. Shirley is a lecturer in Buddhist Studies at Heidelberg University, Germany. He completed his MA in Religious Studies at Te Herenga Waka/Victoria University of Wellington, NZ, and then PhD in Asian Literature, Religion, and Culture at Cornell University in New York, USA.

Dr. Shirley is a historian of religion, gender, and politics in early second-millennium Sri Lanka and beyond. As an academic, he is interested in what it meant to understand oneself as “Buddhist” in medieval South Asia. His research explores a wider range of evidence—from royal inscriptions, to monastic disciplinary codes, to elaborate poems—in order to expose the cracks and fissures between competing visions of Buddhism.

Resources referred to in the interview: 

• Alastair Gornall, Rewriting Buddhism: Pali Literature and Monastic Reform in Sri Lanka, 1157–1270. University College London Press, 2020.
• Day, Tony. “Ties That (Un)Bind: Families and States in Premodern Southeast Asia.” The Journal of Asian Studies 55, no. 2 (1996): 384–409.
• Gunawardana, R. A. L. H. Robe and Plough: Monasticism and Economic Interest in Early Medieval Sri Lanka. University of Arizona Press, 1979.