This is a careful study about the power attributed to historical narratives in early medieval Sri Lanka. On the basis of Sinhala histories of the Buddha and his relics this work sheds new light on historiography at work in a vernacular setting. Arguing that historical texts were both ethically and socially constructive, the author demonstrates that narrative representations of the past served the purpose to transform writers, readers, and listeners of history into virtuous persons, and therewith to generate moral communities. Focusing on the thirteenth-century Sinhala Thupavamsa, this...