A dedicated corpus

The database is split into three main categories : tamnan, anisong, and ‘other’.

The first one is dedicated to the tamnan genre, the main focus of our project. One of the most important genre of northern Thailand traditional literature, the tamnan genre includes stories, histories, chronicles, annals, narratives, legends, allegories, fables and myths. One can say that the tamnan genre is an interpretation — both spiritual and historical — of religious facts, covering the installation of Buddhism in the ancient kingdom of Lanna and its development up until the 20th century.

The second category is dedicated to the anisong (anisaṃsa), a genre close to the tamnan. Consisting of texts commissioned and reproduced to acquire merit (bun , puña,  บุญ ), this genre often uses and borrows from earlier major works.

The last category regroups a number of rare, curious or unclassifiable texts that we came across by chance in the course of our surveys in monastic libraries.