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Acknowledgments I am grateful to my colleagues at the College at Brockport, State University of New York, for providing a most congenial place to work, and to the college itself for funding multiple research trips in both the United States and abroad. The interlibrary loan department at Drake Library was, once again, indefatigable in turning up even the most obscure novels. The research for this project was undertaken at the Bobst Library, New York University; the British Library; the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin; the Huntington Library; the New York Public Library; the Charles E. Young Library, University of California , Los Angeles; and the Union Theological Seminary. I am further indebted to the legions of workers who have digitized texts for Google Books, HathiTrust, and the Internet Archive; without them, this book would have been considerably more difficult to write. My colleague Stefan Jurasinski kindly read the entire manuscript and ensured that this Victorianist’s grasp of the Lollards did not go too far afield. The Victorian Studies Reading Group of Western New York commented extensively on what is now chapter 2. Audiences at the British Women Writer’s Conference, the Modern Language Association , the North American Victorian Studies Association, the Northeast Modern Language Association, and the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies all offered gracious feedback on this project during its earlier stages. I am grateful to the readers at the University of Notre Dame Press for their helpful observations. Over the years, I have bene fited from conversations and communications with Alison Booth, ix James Chandler, Lynette Felber, Elaine Hadley, Michelle Hawley, Elizabeth Helsinger, Diane Long Hoeveler, Arnold Hunt, Teresa Lehr, Karen Lunsford, and a number of visitors, many pseudonymous, to my blog, The Little Professor. Ralph Byles pointed me to background regarding Esther Copley; Ken Hillier suggested some more fictional Lollards; and Daniel Mills supplied information about Emma Leslie, along with a digital copy of one of her rarer novels. As always, my parents , Dorothy and Stanley Burstein, enjoyed reminding me that for an English professor, I was doing something that looked remarkably like history. Part of chapter 2 originally appeared in much different form as “Counter-Medievalism; Or, Protestants Rewrite the Middle Ages,” in Beyond Arthurian Romances and Gothic Thrillers, ed. Jennifer A. Palmgren and Lorretta M. Holloway (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. An earlier version of chapter 4 was published as “Reinventing the Marian Persecutions in Victorian England,” in Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 8, no. 2 (2010) 341–64. Copyright © 2010 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Revised and reprinted with permission by The Johns Hopkins University Press. x | Acknowledgments ...

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