For more than three and a half centuries the Bodleian Library at Oxford has possessed three palm-leaf MSS originating from Java, probably the earliest of their kind to be included in a Western public collection. They bear the shelfmarks MS.Jav.b.l (R), MS.Jav.b.2 (R), and MS.Jav.b.3 (R), for which I shall use the numbers 1, 2, and 3 here for convenience sake.
In the relevant published literature, to be referred to below, there exists some uncertainty, not about the identity of the two persons who donated these MSS, but about the question of which of them gave which one. This is true explicitly for MS. no. 3, and by implication for the others. When first examining this MS, I was informed by the then Keeper of Oriental Books that it “was a 17th century gift, either by Andrew James in 1627, or by the Earl of Pembroke in 1629, more probably the latter”. This dual possibility was subsequently adopted in publications about this MS. Only a recent examination of the pertinent data, both published and unpublished, has shown that they do allow of a definite conclusion being reached, as will be demonstrated below.2