First to be acclaimed is my research assistant, Emma Peacocke, who for more than two years joined in the enterprise of documenting these stories, keeping track of references, gathering resources, and compiling lists with an infectious enthusiasm. Our meetings and conversations have been a source of great intellectual joy. Next, I extend my warmest gratitude to my colleague and friend, Prof. Maurizio Ascari, for facilitating and hosting my stay at the University of Bologna’s Istituto di Studi Avanzati, and for showing me some of the hidden treasures of Bologna and the Lunigiana. I wish to express my heartfelt thanks, as well, to Prof. Barbara Cimati and to the Istituto itself for its generous sponsorship which has enabled me to consult, in the rich holdings of the university’s network of libraries, many of the more elusive resources required to complete this edition.
I would also like to thank Prof. Paul Keen, chairman of Carleton’s Department of English, for his continuing support, and Prof. John Osborne, Dean of Carleton’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, for his unfailing encouragement. I am most grateful to have received the faculty’s Marston LaFrance Research Leave Fellowship, which has enabled me to complete this sprawling project in something like a timely fashion. I am likewise indebted to Rosemarie Hoey, long-time colleague in the Department of English, for her careful perusal of substantial numbers of these stories and commentaries. I want to signal here, as well, my great appreciation for all the Herculean efforts made on my behalf by the librarians and staff of Carleton’s Inter-Library Loan Services, without whose collaboration a project of this nature would have been nearly impossible. It may prove that Straparola lays dubious claim to the greatest predation upon those services in their entire history for a single project!
As well, it is my pleasure to acknowledge the valued collaboration and support of the general editors of the Da Ponte Library Series, Profs. Massimo Ciavolella and Luigi Ballerini of UCLA’s Department of Italian. It has been a satisfaction prolonged to be working with them on a second project for the series. Finally, I am grateful to Ron Schoeffel, Anne Laughlin, and the members of the staff at the University of Toronto Press who have participated in the processing, editing, and production of this heavy pair of tomes, and I extend a very special thanks to Beth McAuley and her assistants Nina Hoeschele and Laura Cok and to John St James whose editorial skills were remarkable and invaluable. It has been a long and challenging round trip of a kind which can never be made alone; my warmest thanks to all who have joined in the venture, including my beloved Marie-Andrée, captive traveller, who has heard far more about Straparola over these past several years than she ever would have imagined.