This book was begun as part of the project “Poetic Knowledge in Late Medieval France” which was funded by the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for a total of four and a half years, from January 2005 to June 2009. The funding framework enabled me to work as part of a team, an experience for which I am profoundly grateful. I acknowledge my indebtedness to all my co-researchers on that project, and especially to the Principal Investigator Adrian Armstrong, for their friendship, companionship, and intellectual stimulus. I enjoyed a Visiting Research Professorship at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, in 2008, at the same time as sabbatical leave and research support from Princeton University, which furnished invaluable opportunities for research and interaction with other scholars. The Humanities Initiative at NYU was so gracious as to provide a subvention toward the cost of printing my Appendices, for which I thank them. I have also been fortunate to be able to present my ideas for this book in a number of forums, and have benefited in ways I cannot begin to quantify from the discussions that have resulted. I first began to explore quotations from the troubadours in 2005, in a paper given at Susan Boynton’s invitation at Columbia University, and from then on one thing led to another. It is invidious to single out names among so many stimulating interlocutors, but I should at least thank Bill Burgwinkle, Patrick ffrench, Ruth Harvey, Cary Howie, Patti Ingham, Scott Francis, Simon Gaunt, Bill Paden, Peggy McCracken, John Moreau, Steve Nichols, Sara Poor, Ian Short, Vance Smith, and Eliza Zingesser. I am especially grateful to the readers who reported to the Press on an earlier version of this study. The late Peter Ricketts was enormously helpful in all matters relating to the Breviari and I am very grateful to him for sharing with me work that was still forthcoming. The same generosity is grounds for thanking Michel-André Bossy, Simon Gaunt, James Helgeson, Charmaine Lee, Daniel O’Sullivan and Elizabeth Poe. Future researchers will join me in paying tribute to Eliza Zingesser for compiling what may be the most important part of this book, Appendix 1, and to my copyeditor, Jennifer Shenk. Finally, I am grateful to my editors at the University of Pennsylvania Press for their continued support and forbearance as what was meant to be a short book grew ineluctably into this one.