This article explores how Old Javanese texts, ‘literary temples’, can be used to help reconstruct the ‘textual community’ (rather than a hegemonic polity) that existed prior to Javaʼs sixteenth-century Islamic conversions. Instead of the physical and economic might of an emerging elite, it focuses on a societyʼs empowering acceptance and understanding of a common culture that is centered in a ritualized court. This ritualized court culture is not, however, just religiously inspired, but also develops out of Javaʼs new generalized prosperity and the courtʼs control over its publicʼs access to material objects, which became the markers of social distinction.