Adequately thanking all who assisted me in writing this book would require a small companion volume; yet my genuine gratitude and a sense of justice require some acknowledgment of help, however general and inadequate. Through an imaginative program within my own academic department, a veritable mesnie of able undergraduate student research assistants (too numerous to mention by name) contributed time and talents and used their keen eyesight to supplement and correct my own vision, severely troubled by retinal disease. On this score, doctors of the medical variety earned more gratitude than I can express: my heartfelt thanks to Steven Rose and Paul Caito. Among undergraduate assistants special thanks must go to Christopher Guyol and Michael Egolf, who generously devoted a year after graduation to advancing this book in scores of ways; Sam Scrimshaw provided valuable information on and from Google word searches, among much else. Ben Tejblum likewise earned a medal.
All my current graduate students have functioned as junior colleagues; they have lived with the evolving book manuscript and provided constant and essential help, discussing ideas, finding and checking sources, proofreading my shambles of drafts. Hearty thanks to each of them for help that finally brought this project to conclusion: Paul Dingman, Daniel Franke, Christopher Guyol, Andrew Harris, Craig Nakashian, and Peter Sposato. Thanks also go to two graduate assistants from the Department of English at Rochester: Dana Symonds and Ryan Harper.
Librarians, as ever, proved themselves a special breed. Particular thanks to Alan Lupack (Director of Robbins Medieval Library, University of Rochester), Alan Unsworth (History Bibliographer, Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester) and Pablo Alvarez (Rare Books and Manuscripts Librarian, Rush Rhees Library). In the Huntingtron Library in Pasadena, California, I owe much to the entire staff and I warmly recall the generous assistance of Mary Robertson (Chief Curator of Manuscripts) and Suzi Krasnoo in Reader Services.
My year at the Huntington Library, in fact, launched this study, and I am most grateful to have held the R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Chair there for 1999–2000. Special thanks go to Roy Ritchie, Director, and all his staff in the Research Division at the Huntington for ceaseless efforts to make that year enjoyable as well as productive. The University of Rochester provided a year of leave that enabled me to accept this position. The Department of History in the California Institute of Technology gave me a one-term teaching position that proved valuable to my own thinking about my themes even as it helped to support my stay in Pasadena. John Mueller, at that time Director of the Wallis Institute at the University of Rochester, offered supplemental funding that was much appreciated, as was his constant interest in topics of shared scholarly concern. For the summer of 2002, I was able to explore and photograph the riches of books of exempla in the British Library thanks to a grant from the Penrose Fund of the American Philosophical Society. Invitations to deliver papers in conferences at the Max Planck Institut in Göttingen, Germany; the Research Center for the Study of Japanese History in Kyoto, Japan; the Five College Symposium in Amherst, Massachusetts; and the Medieval and Renaissance Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, provided splendid forums in which to try out initial ideas.
In a study reaching into historical corners that were new for me, I turned both to medieval and early modern scholars in history, literature, and religion. Within my own university, thanks go to Russell Peck and Thomas Hahn in the Department of English, to Alan Lupack in the Robbins Library, and to Curt Cadorette in the Department of Religion. Extramural thanks are due to Dale Hoak (College of William and Mary), David L. Potter (University of Kent), James B. Collins (Georgetown University), the late Elspeth Kennedy, Scott Waugh, and Teofilo Ruiz (UCLA), Helen Swift (St. Hilda's College, Oxford), Raymond Cormier (Longwood University), Norris J. Lacy (Pennsylvania State University), Kelly DeVries (Loyola College), and Cliff Rogers (U.S. Military Academy).
As ever, the University of Pennsylvania Press proved to be an ideal publisher, and I happily acknowledge the collegial and professional work of Jerry Singerman and his assistant Yumeko Kawano, the series editor, Ruth Mazo Karras,, the superhuman copy editor, Kathryn Krug, and the wise managing editor, Alison Anderson. Hearty thanks also go to the readers who commented perceptively on the book while it was a rough manuscript.
The dedication of this book records a sense of gratitude so overwhelming it should be sung, as indeed the statement quoted is, in the last act of Beethoven's incomparable Fidelio.