Any art historian would be delighted to produce a book beautifully illustrated with excellent images from an outstanding collection. In this case, the images are of Buddhist illuminated manuscripts that belong to the British Library, which has one of the largest collections of Southeast Asian manuscripts in the West, with examples collected from as early as the late seventeenth century. Buddhism Illuminated is dedicated to the memory of Henry David Ginsburg, the late curator of Southeast Asian manuscripts at the British Library.1 This is the third book that solely focuses on Southeast Asian manuscripts in the British Library collection, and is written by two current curators, San San May (specializing in Burmese materials) and Jana Igunma (Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia).
The British Library's Southeast Asian Buddhist manuscript collection contains approximately 1,800 Burmese manuscripts. The materials chosen for this book are mainly Burmese materials from between the eighteenth and the...
