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A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s I am an avid and grateful reader of acknowledgments. Poring over others’ books taught me what I wanted my book to be; poring over their acknowledgments taught me that I couldn’t—and didn’t have to—get there on my own. No doubt there are people for whom writing is an ideally solitary pursuit, but for me it’s a necessarily communal endeavor (so much so that there’s a long list of Philadelphia and New Haven coffee shops whose proprietors ought to get a mention here for their forbearance), and I’ve been incredibly fortunate in the company I keep. That good fortune begins with two extraordinary teachers and mentors. Margreta de Grazia is my most generous, most rigorous, and most constant reader, whose good opinion is worth any number of revisions. I hope she likes this book because I wrote it for her. David Kastan is a bottomless well of enthusiasm, insight, and plain good sense; for the sake of its junior members, the profession should seriously consider cloning him. Not far behind Margreta and David stand a host of advisers, colleagues, and friends who have been pressed into service (or offered themselves) as readers of this book in its many earlier forms: Sean Keilen and Ania Loomba, who got me started; David Quint, who helped me to the finish; Larry Manley and John Rogers, who give the role of senior colleague a good name; Barbara Fuchs, who invited me to California when I really needed the sunshine; J. K. Barret, who tells me what I want and what I need to hear (in that order); and Ian Cornelius, Wendy Lee, and Aaron Ritzenberg, partners in the struggle against the blank screen. Thanks are also due to Stephanie Elsky, John Guillory , Jenny Mann, Joe Roach, Caleb Smith, Peter Stallybrass, Brian Walsh, and John Williams for offering advice, encouragement, inspiration, and camaraderie and for sustaining my conviction that academia is a remarkably friendly place. Briallen Hopper deserves a paragraph of her own: she’s the best prose stylist, close reader, and godmother I know, and the most loyal friend I’ve got. 218 Acknowledgments I owe an enormous debt to Jerry Singerman at the University of Pennsylvania Press, who has offered warm encouragement and savvy advice at every step of the publication process—I’m lucky to have had him as a reader and champion. The two anonymous readers for the press treated the manuscript with exceptional care, searching out its merits and its defects with unerring keenness and helping me to see, at last, what sort of book I wanted to write. I am most grateful to them both. I’ve benefited as well from the opportunity to share portions of this project with smart and responsive audiences at the Yale Medieval-Renaissance Colloquium, the Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies at UCLA, the Medieval-Renaissance Colloquium at the University of Pennsylvania , and the Massachusetts Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies . Yale University provided essential and generous support in the form of a Morse Junior Faculty Fellowship for 2011–12. I’m grateful to Spenser Studies and Oxford University Press for permission to reuse previously published material: a portion of Chapter 2 appears as “Englishing Eloquence: Vernacular Rhetorics and Poetics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Renaissance Prose, ed. Andrew Hadfield (Oxford University Press, forthcoming in 2013); an earlier version of Chapter 3 appeared as “Pastoral in Exile: Spenser and the Poetics of English Alienation,” Spenser Studies 23 (2008). Finally, there are those who don’t read a word I write, and whose support is all the more precious for it. Diarmuid and Donna Nicholson are the best parents an early-career academic could ask for: serenely oblivious to the minutia of the profession, firmly convinced of my capacity to surmount all obstacles, undaunted by my setbacks, and delighted (but unsurprised) by my successes. Marc, Miriam, and Ruth Levenson are the source of my deepest and most durable joys. Marc makes writing possible, through endless gifts of time and reassurance; Miriam and Ruthie make it nearly impossible, but that can be a gift too. This book is also for them, with all my heart. ...

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