Description

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Johannes Klatt's (1852-1903) Jaina-Onomasticon, an 839 page long bio-bibliographical index of proper names of Jaina authors, sects, texts, and places, with excerpts of biographical information covering more than 2000 years, was published in 2019. The Index volume is an independent work of scholarship by the authors, supplementary to Klatt's classic text. Located at the crossroads of the fields of Indology and Historical Sociology, it offers an introductory essay and twenty-three thematic indexes, generated by cross-referencing the data compiled by Klatt with the help of the Jaina-Prosopography Database, whose ID numbers it refers to as well (jaina-prosopography.org). The indexes reveal the hidden historical links between named individuals, their social background, religious affiliations, networks, religious careers, places, texts, and role and relationship patterns, frequently linked to events. The new methodology and the data will be of interest for future investigations of the shifting historical geographical fields of influence of Jaina schools and sects, patterns of recruitment and patronage, and the history of literary and religious culture in South Asia in general. As the first case study in Jaina prosopography, the work will serve as a paradigm for a new field of inquiry, combining the tools of Indology, Sociology, and Digital Humanities.