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Acknowledgments It is a great pleasure to be able to thank publicly all those who have supported this project. First, I would like to thank David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, Fredric Jameson, Leigh DeNeef, and Lee Patterson, generous readers, good friends, and intellectual models for many years now; it has been a delight to renew conversations with each of them so many times over the past years. At Ohio State University, I have had the good fortune to work among a group of dedicated and skilled medievalists. Nick Howe, Lisa Kiser, Karen Winstead, and Chris Zacher have been ideal intellectual comrades; each has unstintingly volunteered careful readings of this manuscript, and each has added a measure of their own insight and expertise to this book. My students at Ohio State have also been a constant source of new questions and new ideas, and I thank them here for their energetic engagement with our common work. For invitations to present parts of this book, I am grateful to Tony Hasler, Fiona Somerset, Jennifer Summit, Maura Nolan, Kellie Robertson, and Catherine Batt. I appreciate also the many insightful questions and comments offered at these occasions, most especially a lively afternoon session at the Notre Dame Medieval Institute. Charles Blyth, Jacqueline Brown, Chris Chism, Roger Ellis, Judith Ferster, James Phelan, Malcolm Richardson, Larry Scanlon, Paul Strohm, Jennifer Summit, and Nicholas Watson have all given palpable aid to this book—sharing work in progress, reading portions of the manuscript, and offering comments that helped shape the book in important ways. David Lawton and Derek Pearsall read the manuscript for Penn State University Press, and both took the time to offer gracious and challenging readings, saving me from many errors in the process. Patricia DeMarco has helped me through every idea and read every word in this text; she is my chief collaborator. Finally, though we have never met, I would also like to thank John Burrow, whose groundbreaking essays on Hoccleve encouraged me to believe that he was a poet worth spending time with. My research was supported by several grants from the Ohio State Univer- x Acknowledgments sity. A Seed Grant from the Office of Research provided for a quarter release from teaching in fall 1998. A Grant-in-Aid from the College of Humanities funded travel to British libraries and archives in the summer of 2000, and a special research assignment and probationary faculty development quarter allowed me to devote the winter of 1997 and fall of 1999 to research and writing. A grant from the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Ohio State helped defray additional costs associated with the research for this volume. I am grateful also to the staff at the Ohio State University Libraries, whom I have not yet been able to stump with any request. I have been exceptionally lucky in the support of friends and family throughout this labor. My parents, Hugh and Elinor Knapp, are the foundations of this work, and it is dedicated to them. Earlier versions of Chapters 1 and 4 appeared in Speculum 74 (1999): 357–76 and in Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 247–74. Revised versions appear here by kind permission of the editors. Last, I would like to thank Peter Potter and the editorial staff at Penn State University Press for encouraging and skillfully fostering this text. ...

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