I would like to thank my colleagues at the University of Tennessee for their support of this book’s progress, especially Jeff Mellor in the Department of Modern and Foreign Languages; David Tandy in Classics; Robert Bast in History; and, most particularly, Tina Shephardson in Religious Studies for her generosity in reading and responding to a portion of my argument about allegory in the ancient world. My thanks, too, for the labor and eloquence of Erin Read, formerly my research assistant and now a program coordinator for MARCO, the University’s new institute for medieval and Renaissance studies. I would also like to acknowledge gratefully the financial aid given to my research by the Trustees of the John C. Hodges Fund in the University’s English Department.
Outside my own university, I am indebted to a variety of friends for help on this book. Carol Kaske long ago initiated me into what she politely calls the Melanchthon mafia, and I have profited from her generous advice about Reformed theology and enormous knowledge of the Bible. Germaine Warkentin has several times filled gaps in my knowledge of Sidney’s books—and tested assumptions about what I thought I knew. I have benefited, too, from conversations with Lee Piepho, who knows so much about that vast body of neo-Latin literature most of us (at our peril) neglect to read. With these, Anne Lake Prescott encouraged my work on this book, at early stages and late, with warmth and with wisdom, and I have received her attention like grace, unmerited.
For the past 20 years the community that has best energized my thinking about the literary culture of the Renaissance has been the crew at Kalamazoo, whose intoxication with the serio ludere of the mind sustains me still. I cannot name them all, so a few must stand in gratitude for the rest: Bill Oram, Wayne Erickson, Jon Quitslund, Judith Anderson, Marianne Micros, Ted Steinberg, David Wilson-Okamura, Beth Quitslund, Andrew Escobedo, Joel Davis, Jean Goodrich, Gavin Alexander, John Watkins, Charles Ross, Lauren Silberman, Bill Craft, John Webster, and John Ulreich. Allied to this group are my friends who have contributed to Sidney at Kalamazoo and the building of the Sidney Society, especially Arthur Kinney and Margaret Hannay, Victor Skretkowicz, Mary Ellen Lamb, Clare Kinney, Robert Shephard, Don Stump, Helen Vincent, and my former colleagues at the University of Tennessee Lisa Celovsky and Joe Black. I would be badly at fault, too, if I did not remember the person who nurtured that community into existence, Jerry Rubio, the best of shepherds, now sadly deceased.
Beyond all of these, I owe the greatest debt of gratitude to Roger Kuin, whose nattering and knowledge, friendship and wisdom, made this book possible.
Material from “The Scope of Sidney’s Defence of Poesy: The New Hermeneutics and Early Modern Poetics,” English Literary Renaissance 32 (2002), 355–85 appears in revised form as part of Chapter 2; some portions of “‘Deadly Stinging Adders’: Sidney’s Piety, Philippism, and The Defence of Poesy,” Spenser Studies 16 (2002), 231–69, have been revised and expanded in Chapter 3; and my essay entitled, “The Truths of a Slippery World: Poetry and History in Sidney’s Defence,” Renaissance Quarterly 55 (2002), 1287–1319, has been revised and incorporated into Chapter 4. I am grateful to the editors of these journals for their permission to reprint.