Acknowledgments
I am grateful to many people for their help with my doctoral research: John Mullan, Matt Symonds, Lucy Stagg, and Melissa Terras of UCL; Bernhard Fuehrer of SOAS; my examiners, Colin Jones of Queen Mary University London and Peter Frankopan of the University of Oxford; and my neighbors Charles and Carol Webster who kindly read the first draft and encouraged me along the way.
For help with the book, I would like to thank the three wonderful contributors, Gillian Pink, Michel Hermans, S.J., and Alison Oliver. Yangruxin Liu of SOAS diligently proofread the Chinese text, Tim Page helped compile the final version and bibliography, and Raymond Deapew-Paas compiled the index. Francis Knikker and Irene Jager at Brill provided superbly professional oversight. The Presses Universitaires de Namur and Editions Lessius kindly gave permission for us to translate Michel Hermans’s essay on Joseph Amiot. My thanks also to Robert A. Maryks, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Jesuit Studies and the Jesuit Studies monograph series at Brill, and to Yasmin Haskell of the University of Western Australia for introducing us.
The path that led here began when I met Lisa Jardine at Cambridge in 1983. I was fortunate to have Lisa as tutor, friend, and supervisor for three decades from my first days as an undergraduate to the last days of my doctoral research. No one offered wiser counsel, warmer friendship, or greater love of learning, in all of its manifestations and possibilities, than Lisa. This work is, therefore, dedicated with love to Professor Lisa Jardine, CBE FRSFRHistS (1944–2015). In the words engraved in Beijing by Joseph Amiot, omnia omnibus facta ut omnes lucrifaceret.
Portrait of Joseph Amiot in watercolour by an anonymous Chinese painter (c. 1793). The original is in the collection of the Amyot family; this copy was made at the end of the nineteenth century. Bibliothèque de l'Institut de France, MS 1515, fol. 3. Reprinted with permission of the Institut de France.