The Unbridled Horse in the Royal Garden: Women’s Moral Formation in Serat Pratamakenya
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.20961/filitra.v2i1.3988Kata Kunci:
women’s moral formation, Serat Pratamakenya, maqāṣid al-sharīʿah, relational agency, Javanese Islamic ethics, single-manuscript philologyAbstrak
This article examines women’s moral formation in Serat Pratamakenya, an eighteenth-century Javanese advice text attributed to Pangeran Pringgalaya and addressed to his eldest daughter. The study focuses on the expression wanita tindak dudu kuda mijil ing tamansari, which compares improper female conduct to an unbridled horse released into a royal garden. Combining single-manuscript philology with qualitative discourse analysis, the research treats manuscript NB 2956 as a historically situated codex and reconstructs selected propositions of counsel from its intricate poetic arrangement. Particular attention is given to the relationship between the manuscript’s riddling form, semantic reconstruction, and moral instruction. The findings show that the image of the unbridled horse functions as the governing metaphor through which subsequent counsels on speech, dress, patience, religious knowledge, family obligation, social conduct, and ancestral remembrance can be understood. The manuscript does not construct women merely as passive or deficient subjects. It imagines them as possessing significant bodily, relational, and spiritual force whose consequences extend to parents, husbands, relatives, and descendants. Moral restraint therefore operates as the management of consequential female energy. At the same time, the text remains unmistakably hierarchical, placing upon women a disproportionate responsibility for preserving domestic and social order. The article argues that restriction and agency are not presented as simple opposites in the manuscript. Women are disciplined precisely because their conduct is believed capable of transforming the moral environment around them. The later transmission of the text further demonstrates how private paternal counsel acquired a longer life as courtly moral discourse.
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