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Sanskrit Hymns Across Traditions: Studying Stotras book cover

1st Edition

Sanskrit Hymns Across Traditions Studying Stotras

Edited By Hamsa Stainton, Anna Lee White Copyright 2026
284 Pages 13 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

284 Pages 13 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
Sanskrit hymns of praise ( stotra / stuti / stava ) have been popular and influential within multiple religious traditions for thousands of years. Sanskrit hymns remain lively, meaningful parts of the religious lives of countless Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains today, and new stotra s continue to be composed and recited around the world. The academic study of these hymns has made notable progress... Read more

1. Introduction: Studying Stotras Across Traditions (Hamsa Stainton)

Part One: On the Stotra Genre

2. Navigating an Ocean of Hymns: Popular Anthologies and the Study of Sanskrit Stotras (Hamsa Stainton)

3. An Epistemology of Stotra: Hemacandra’s Understanding of the Hymnic Genre through His Mahādeva Stotra (Lynna R. Dhanani)

4. Praise-Poems in Kṛṣṇa Temples and Royal Courts: Virudāvalī as Stotra and Praśasti (David Buchta)

Part Two: Recitation, Liturgy, and Preaching

5. The Jain Hymn of Undying Devotion: An Annotated Translation of the Bhaktāmara Stotra of Mānatuṅga (Steven M. Vose)

6. History, Supernormal Powers, and Liturgy: Jain Sets of Stotras (John E. Cort)

7. Praise You as I Should: Stotras and the Dharma-Preacher (Dharmabhāṇaka) in Mahāyāna Buddhist Sūtras (Ralph H. Craig III)

8. Stotra as Mantra and Materiality: The Case of Budha-Kauśika’s Rāmarakṣāstotra (Gudrun Bühnemann)

Part Three: Polemics and Publics: Stotras between and Across Traditions

9. Receptiveness, Assertion, and Subversion in Sectarian Spaces: Appayya Dīkṣita, Madhusūdana Sarasvatī, and Engagement Across Traditions (Matthew Leveille)

10. When Haradatta Met Kūreśa: Printed Stotras and the Public Memory of Sectarian Figures in India between the Seventeenth and Twentieth Centuries (Vishal Sharma)

11. Colonial-Era Engagements with the Stotra Genre: Bhāratendu Hariścandra’s Sītāvallabhastotra (Anna Lee White)

Epilogue

12. Stotra Musings: Shared and Contested Spaces of the Praise Poem Across Traditions (Steven P. Hopkins)

Biography

Hamsa Stainton is an Associate Professor in the School of Religious Studies at McGill University (Montréal, Canada). He is the author of Poetry as Prayer in the Sanskrit Hymns of Kashmir (2019) and co-editor (with Bettina Sharada Bäumer) of Tantrapuṣpāñjali: Tantric Traditions and Philosophy of Kashmir; Studies in Memory of Pandit H.N. Chakravarty.

Anna Lee White

is a Lecturer in the Humanities Department of Marianopolis College (Montréal, Canada). Her research interests include Hindu devotional literature, hagiographies, and gender studies.

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