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Acknowledgments For the opportunity to spend a year at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, provided with stacks of obscure nineteenth-century monographs and long, quiet days in which to read them, I am profoundly thankful. Among the highlights of that sojourn were the weeks spent at the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbuttel using its extraordinary collection of early modern juristic literature. The final draft of this book was written in the tranquil beauty of the Liguria Study Center at Bogliasco. I cannot begin to express my gratitude to these amazing institutions, nor to my own institution, the University of California at Los Angeles, on whose splendid library and research support I have relied throughout. Stephen Greenblatt and Robert Post read my first musings on this subject , and their interest in the project, more than anything else, inspired me to keep going. I was fortunate to have several generous and learned colleagues comment on the whole manuscript: Al Braunmuller, Anne Myers, Karen Orren , Rob Watson, and, as reader for the press, Katharine Maus. Andy Kelly, whom I called from Berlin on a near-weekly basis, guided a perplexed early modernist through the labyrinth of medieval canon law. Dale Shuger translated the Spanish, came up with the title, participated in endless discussions, and contributed innumerable insights. I have benefited time and again from the acuity and erudition of such wonderful scholars as Cyndia Clegg, David Cressy, Jonathan Crewe, Reg Foakes, Dennis Kezar, Arthur Kinney, Arthur Marotti, Claire McEachern, Andrew McRae, Annabel Patterson, Anne Lake Prescott, Richard Strier. My warmest thanks to Georges Khalil of the Wissenschaftskolleg for forwarding me the letter quoted in the conclusion of this book, and to the other fellows whose comments and criticism sharpened my own thinking, especially Richard Bernstein, Dorothea Frede, Jaroslaw Jargewicz, Suzanne Marchand, Alexei Rutkevich, and Mauricio Tenorio Trillo. It has been my great happiness to have a department chair, Tom Wortham, whom I can thank from the bottom of my heart for his unflagging support. * * * 346 Acknowledgments A note on the text: I have modernized and standardized the spelling, punctuation , and accidentals of English-language texts throughout (excluding the endnotes and book titles, which are cited unchanged). Except for a handful of technical legal terms, I have transposed all foreign-language material into English, using published translations where available. For standard classical authors and for scholarship written after 1800, I give only the English. For previously untranslated works from before 1800, I include the original (unmodernized ) as well. ...

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