This volume of 14 essays emerged from three international workshops that were held in Paris and Tokyo between 2014 and 2019. The editors have loosely organised the contributions into ‘dictionaries and lexicographical tools allying European languages (from Portuguese to Russian) with Central or East Asian languages’ (p. 12). It is not clear, however, which, if any, chapters discuss Central Asian languages (perhaps Söderblom Saarela's chapter on Manchu?). The first chapter considers early European studies of Konkani—a South Asian language. While acknowledging gaps in regional coverage (‘Korea and Vietnam, not to mention Inner Asia, are missing here’, p. 17) and disavowing any claim to ‘provide a general overview of all the bilingual (trilingual, etc.) dictionaries born between East Asian cultures and Western agents of empire [… or] a comprehensive narrative of their history’ (p. 13), the coverage of certain lexicographic traditions—in particular, European lexicons that gloss over Japanese and various Chinese languages—is quite extensive. The editors of this volume do not claim to be experts on the history of lexicography or linguistics, and thus they do not attempt a systematic discussion of the more technical aspects of the texts under consideration (p. 17). Several chapters are devoted to the history of the book: ‘The afterlives of these pioneering works show that most of the time they were consigned to the artificial slumber of libraries until their rediscovery by modern scholars’ (p. 15).

With a few notable and illuminating exceptions, most of the lexicons that are examined in this volume were produced by Catholic missionaries and, as such, are adjacent to the specialised field of ‘missionary linguistics’ that is led by figures such as Otto Zwartjes and Toon van Hal. The first chapter, by Dejanirah Couto, provides a helpful overview of early Portuguese efforts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to describe and understand the Konkani language of the western coast of India. Though the chapter largely ignores materials that are written in South Asian languages, and its author repeats questionable claims about the relationship of Konkani with the Austroasiatic Mundari language (p. 35), a useful narrative of colonial Portuguese-language policy nevertheless emerges, including concerted efforts at ‘cultural destruction’ (p. 29) and the inevitable compromises enacted by the Portuguese as they sought to evangelise and administer territories in western India. The second chapter, by Kishimoto Emi, provides a close reading of several entries related to astronomy in a Latin–Portuguese–Japanese dictionary that was printed in Japan by Jesuits in 1595, with a particular focus on the sources of the information contained in these entries. Two chapters are devoted to the Vocabulario da Lingoa de Iapam, which was printed in Japan in 1603–1604. Rui Manuel Loureiro provides an excellent case study of the significance, format, and content of this Japanese–Portuguese dictionary. He suggests that the Vocabulario was a ‘veritable master-key giving access to the “secrets” of Japanese language and culture’ (p. 92), but there are few references to Japanese-language sources. François Lachaud, one of the volume's co-editors, devotes his chapter to telling the story of the production, loss, and resurrection of the Vocabulario. With this book as the focal point, the author is able to tell a more expansive story about the Jesuits in Japan. Ōshima Mikio's contribution—one of the highlights of this volume—tells the fascinating tale of an early Russian–Japanese lexicon and the shipwrecked Japanese sailors who helped a Russian nobleman to compile it. The discussion of the gulf in social class between the parties was revealing and illuminated the deeper political consequences of this lexicographical project. The chapter that was co-authored by Henning Klöter and Hans-Jörg Döhla examines four early bilingual Spanish–Hokkien dictionaries that were prepared in the Philippines, focusing on the different macrostructures and what these reveal about the conditions of production. Like the previous chapter, the spoken forms of language that are documented in these dictionaries, inasmuch as they diverge from classical languages or literary registers, offer rare insights into the sociolinguistic interactions of colonisers with subject populations. Miría Teresa González Linaje's chapter serves as a bridge that fills gaps by discussing the relationship between several less-studied dictionaries that were prepared by Spanish friars in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the ‘hidden culture’ embedded in these texts. She argues that the similarities between these works should not be considered ‘in terms of plagiarism but [instead] of collaboration’ (p. 193). Michela Bussotti's detailed (and lengthy) chapter explores the history of the book to demonstrate the connections between various bilingual Chinese dictionaries preserved in manuscript in an age that was dominated by print production. With its long, discursive footnotes and often fascinating tangents (see e.g. the discussion of marginalia on p. 248), however, the reader occasionally struggles to see the forest for the trees. Yang Huiling examines the way in which the seventeenth-century Franciscan missionary Basilio Brollo adapted well-known Chinese monolingual dictionaries such as the Zihui to compile his own Chinese–Latin dictionaries. While this chapter is more firmly located within lexicographical studies, the lack of English translations for some of the case studies leaves some of the points unnecessarily obscure. Mariarosaria Gianninoto finds it difficult, in her discussion of the treatment of so-called ‘empty words’ (grammatical particles) in European dictionaries and grammars of Chinese, to situate these studies within broader efforts to understand Europe's linguistic ‘others’ or draw connections with other chapters in this volume (compare with Söderblom Saarela's discussion of grammatical markers on p. 355, for example). Its fragmentary style and frequent use of verbatim quotations from secondary sources may, unfortunately, deter all but the most committed readers. In contrast, Eugenio Menegon's microhistory (or ‘bookish thriller’, p. 320) provides a rich and engaging history of the quixotic travels of Pruggmyr's Italian–Chinese vocabulary between China and various European realms in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Menegon does a marvellous job of tracing the careers of the European figures who were involved with its production, transmission, and reception, and offers tantalising insights into the interest of European lexicographers in documenting the spoken forms of Chinese. In his excellent chapter, Mårten Söderblom Saarela provides an encyclopaedic overview of European studies of the Manchu language from the seventeenth century through to the nineteenth century. He considers the complex sociolinguistic situation that saw the Manchu language emerge during this period as a ‘cosmopolitan vernacular’, serving as a language of the early Qing elite and a commentarial apparatus for classical Chinese texts. For the final chapter of this volume, Yoshikawa Masayuki offers a descriptive consideration of the structure of three nineteenth-century Cantonese–English dictionaries. He concludes by discussing similar works that were prepared for other Chinese languages. His discussion of tones was difficult to follow for this non-expert and the chapter would benefit from a more robust sociolinguistic framing. That said, it will serve as a useful reference for scholars who are working on the history of the lexicography of Chinese languages.

The editors are to be commended for commissioning excellent English translations of contributions that were prepared by scholars who work in languages other than English. The entire volume is sumptuously illustrated with high-quality reproductions of rare print and manuscript materials. The choice of footnotes over endnotes was a bold and welcome choice. As is inevitable with any edited volume, the style, format, and length of the chapters vary significantly. With few exceptions, the presentation of the multilingual texts is almost universally outstanding. The prolix French epigraph with which the book begins is not translated into English, and neither are the French and Italian epigraphs that introduce Lachaud's chapter. Is it safe to assume that the varied readers of this volume all have sufficient command of French or Italian to make sense of these passages?

This book may be read productively with other recent volumes on the global history of lexicography.Footnote ¹ The contributors would have benefitted from a shared technical vocabulary and more consistent application of cross references. Like the proverbial blind men and the elephant, each must find their own way to describe, for example, the distinction between onomasiological (or thematic) macrostructures and the now-common arrangement by graphical structure (e.g. alphabetical ordering; see e.g. p. 221). Several chapters address issues that are related to the documentation by European missionaries and philologists of largely unwritten languages (e.g. Loureiro on Japanese informants, Mikio on the eighteenth-century dialect of the Tōkuhu region). Only Söderblom Saarela engages with Sheldon Pollock's framework of cosmopolitan and vernacular languages and the associated processes of literisation, literarisation, territorialisation, and ethnicisation, and no one deals with earlier models of the diglossia that was developed by Charles Ferguson and Joshua Fishman or Benedict Anderson's influential depiction of print culture and nationalism.Footnote ² Had the contributors all been asked to read one or more of these classic works on language or lexicography (by Zgusta, Landau, or McArthur, for instance) and perhaps engaged in a more sustained way with one another, then some of the terminological confusion and repetition of content could have been avoided.Footnote ³ If they had discussed a shared conceptual framework—even if it had entailed the ultimate rejection of such a framework—then readers could more easily discover useful parallels with other linguistic traditions, and the whole might have proven to be greater than the sum of its parts. It is thus a shame that the many fascinating nooks and crannies that are scattered throughout this 500-page tome may remain inaccessible to all but the most devoted specialists.