The authors of this book have sought to offer a wide-lens, global view of religious encounter in Asia that will pique the interest of early modern scholars inside and outside their usual purviews. It was an unusual, and perhaps in retrospect foolhardy, undertaking: one that treats parts of not only East Asia, but also Southeast and South Asia in a single forum, and then not simply inter-Asian currents, but also in dialogue with America and Europe, in order to broaden a virtual conversation among scholars working around the world. Crossing the boundaries of regional studies has required expected changes, such as making materials approachable across geographies, fields, and languages. It has also necessitated unanticipated shifts, such as crafting solutions that honoured disciplinary preferences and political sensitivities, where different pasts have complicated the use of English, and yet would still be understood by those brave souls following the orientations of their internal compasses to probe beyond their habitual haunts.
The rule of thumb governing this volume has been to make information complete and easily accessible for further research where spatial limits permit, maintaining a consistent overarching format while still taking individual style into consideration. In addition to the Western-language translation conventions standard to the Intersections series, this study has adhered to the following rules for the translation and transliteration of non-Western languages. Southeastern and South Asian names are written in the order of first name last name (and alphabetised in the index by last name, first name). East Asian names are written last name first name (and alphabetised in the index by last name first name without a comma between them). Since English is the language of this Europe-based series, non-Latin characters are only provided for pre-1800 names of historical figures and primary sources at the time of first mention within the chapter, where appropriate, with romanisation as the access point for the twelve non-Latin scripts used in these essays, including Arabic, Bengali, Japanese, Kashmiri, Mandarin Chinese, Malayalam, Persian, Sanskrit, Syriac, Tagalog, Tamil, and Urdu. The titles of primary sources in non-European languages, as well as in the eight European languages cited (English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, and Spanish), have been translated to facilitate different language proficiencies among area specialists. Unfortunately, the constraints of an abbreviated reference format did not permit the translation of secondary source titles. Capitalisation has followed the internal rules of the twenty languages involved. The presentation of foreign words has followed the usage of the current English-language dictionary; those words not included retain italicisation and diacritical marks. Image titles use English to facilitate the flow of argumentation.
The editors of this manuscript have tried to be as complete as possible, but during an era when consistency was not always prioritised and local variations proliferated, the original has been the determining factor. And of course, then, as now, there are exceptions to every rule. No effort has been spared to achieve cohesion, but mistakes always worm their way into any text, particularly in multi-author collaborations spanning such a range of knowledge, and for that we humbly offer readers our sincere apologies. We have tried to make the results of these investigations valuable for an audience of international scholars, in order to aid other attempts to breach the still entrenched, and no less off-putting for rarely being visible, barriers of academic fields, with the hope that these ideas will continue to be explored by those who will enrich the historiography with their own perspectives and external, but never incidental, zones of expertise.