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Acknowledgments
- University of Notre Dame Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
I set out to explore the roots of early modern literary culture in the dream of a transcendent Word, only to become caught up in a story about the inextricability of human meaning making from the gritty mysteries of incarnation .That same trajectory has marked my behind-the-scenes process as a scholar and a writer. At more points along the way than I can count, my “intended pattern” has been vitally transformed by the well-timed words of those with whom I have been privileged to live and work in community . Insofar as the final pattern is a “lively” one, it is due to their ongoing inspiration. First among equals are my earliest intellectual mentors at the University of North Carolina.To Megan Matchinske, Reid Barbour, and Peter Kaufman, thank you for believing I was on to something before I did and for giving me the tools I needed to find out for myself. I am also deeply indebted to my colleagues at California Lutheran University and Texas A&M, whose good advice and good company have sustained me as my argument took shape. Particular thanks go to Pat Phillipy, Jim Harner, and Margaret Ezell for their feedback at various stages in the drafting process and to Nancy Bradley Warren for her invaluable support in that last push toward publication.Thanks are due as well to my able undergraduate vii research assistant, James Rians, for his careful editorial work. In addition to intellectual and moral support, I have also enjoyed generous financial support at Texas A&M University from the Department of English, the Office for the Vice President of Research, and the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research. This project has also benefited from support more far afield. My thanks to the International Sidney Society for providing such a friendly and lively forum for the discussion of ideas that eventually became chapters 2 and 3 and also to David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, and James Simpson, whose willingness to read a draft of chapter 3 changed everything. To Robert Stillman , thank you for being every bit as inclusive and intellectually generous as your beloved Philippists. Finally, I am grateful to my anonymous evaluators at University of Notre Dame Press, whose insightful comments were enormously helpful. Part of the introduction appeared previously as “The Imitation of Christ in English Reformation Writing,” Literature Compass 8, no. 4 (2011): 195–205. I am grateful to Wiley Blackwell for permission to reprint this material. Part of chapter 1 was published previously in an essay entitled “Imitatio and Identity:Thomas Rogers, Philip Sidney, and the Protestant Self,” English Literary Renaissance 35 (2005): 365–406; and part of chapter 2 was published earlier as “The Sound of Silence: Elizabeth Cary and the Christian Hero,” English Literary Renaissance 38 (2008): 106–41. My thanks to English Literary Renaissance and Wiley Online Library for permission to reprint these essays. The deepest debts are always the most difficult to repay in words. My fellow Inwits will particularly appreciate this irony. To Mary Lenn Dixon and Chris Hines, thank you for sitting with me while I waited.To Logen Cure, thank you for keeping me company on many a long writing day.To the inimitable Carol Guthrie, thank you for the divine gift of true conversation . Where would I be without your clear voice? I give thanks to the people of St. Francis Episcopal Church in College Station for the many blessings of spiritual community, and to my parents by birth and by marriage for four different studies in wrestling with the angel, each of them equally faithful and beautiful. Last and most hopelessly inadequately of all, thanks to Britt Mize and Ruby Perry-Mize, my “brave and companionable ” fellow travelers on this and every journey. This was for you. viii Acknowledgments ...