'an important and welcome contribution to the study of premodern South Asian intellectual history and Pali literature and to scholarship on Buddhist textuality and institutional life in what is now Sri Lanka'
H-Buddhism

'Clearly, concisely ...and richly documented, Rewriting Buddhism manages to depict in all its complexity the place occupied by pali literature in a particular sequence in the history of Sri Lanka.' Bulletin de l'École française d'Extrême-Orient

'A masterful contribution towards the resolution of what Steven Collins designated as being 'the problem of literature in Pali, ' that is, the question as to why Pali kāvya emerged when and where it did (Collins 2003, 649-50). Meticulously researched, philologically rigorous, and intellectually capacious in its engagement with issues in grammar, poetics, philosophy of language, and sociology, Gornall delivers an engaging book surely to be of interest to specialists of premodern South Asian literature, Theravada Buddhism, and historians of India and Sri Lanka.'
Religion