Abstract Summary
Malay-language recipes compiled in modern manuscripts, now catalogued as kitab tibb, kitab obat-obatan, and kitab mujarrabat, have become an essential part of Malay manuscript collections particularly in the Indonesian archipelago and in western Europe. These latent compilations of humoral, Prophetic, and indigenous medicine not only include recipes using plants from the eastern archipelago but also detailed instructions for creating amulets to be used for war as much as for love. This paper explores different possibilities for understanding how recipes pertaining to women, children, and to the household were historically transmitted and eventually compiled or copied by male scribes in local court or Islamic settings in island Southeast Asia. I argue that one way of contextualizing the historical formation of these manuscripts is by tracing their fragments in early modern Malay, Arabic, and Dutch texts about medicine, religion, and natural history, and to do so with an eye toward the workings of gender and class in processes of mediation and in mediated information. In bridging the gap between histories of manuscript transmission and of cross-cultural interaction in the Dutch East Indies, this paper attempts to recalibrate the cultural scales of secrecy and exclusivity as applied to medicinal and religious knowledge in the archipelago.
