This volume is the outcome of the conference "Studying Documents in Pre-Modern South Asia and Beyond: Problems and Perspective", held in October 2014 in Heidelberg. In bringing together experts from different fields-including Indology, Tibetology, History, Anthropology, Religious Studies, and Digital Humanties-it aims at exploring and rethinking issues of diplomatics and typology, the place of documents in relation to other texts and literary genres, methods of archiving and editing documents, as well as their "social life", i.e. the role they play in social, religious and political constellations, the agents and practices of their use, and the norms and institutions they embody and constitute.