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Acknowledgments Although I alone hold blame for the present book, Peter Dronke has responsibility for having proposed it to me fifteen years ago, and I thank him for both that initial incitement and for his meticulous reading of a recent draft. For their thoughtful attention to the same version, I am also grateful to the other reader for the Catholic University of America Press, Paul Dutton, as well as to the series editor. While the book was in production, I was fortunate to have the painstaking editing of Philip Gerard Holthaus. Together with anyone else who works with most of the materials translated here, I owe a debt to the late Edmé Smits for his impeccable edition of the Latin. Originally, when my plan was a dual-language edition, he graciously extended to me the right to reprint his text. After Edmé’s sadly sudden death, his literary executor , L. C. Engels, reaffirmed the permission with equal generosity . At that stage, since scanning was not yet a possibility, Lenore Parker keyboarded for me the Latin of Edmé Smits’s text and textual notes. (About the same time she also inputted on the basis of my longhand the rough drafts of the English translations: my warm thanks go to her for everything.) Years later Philip Kim proofread the Latin material (just as he later did the page proofs of this book), for which I am grateful even if it is not appearing alongside the English as I had once envisaged. It is splendid that the Latin will appear shortly in the Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, where far more than a mere corpusculum of Peter Abelard’s works has now come together. ix Completion of the present project would have been inconceivable without the simultaneous sedation and stimulation that the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study provided me for ten months in 2005–2006. For the privilege of being ensconced in the soothing environs of Wassenaar, I am deeply beholden.The librarians of the institute worked wonders in supplying me rapidly and copiously with books and articles, and my fellow medievalists in the attic bore with my occasional unsolicited monologues about Abelard’s writings. In addition, Emily Vasiliauskas helped me ably again and again from afar as my research assistant in Cambridge to secure items and verify references more readily handled through Widener and other collections in the Harvard College Library. Finally , I thank Sarah Watson for generating the map. As the project was rounding the final bend, Chrysogonus Waddell did me the kindness of identifying two snippets from hymns that had been eluding my grasp, and I am glad to offer him my appreciation. My greatest debt is owed to the dedicatee. A topos of acknowledgments would have me express appreciation to her for having borne with me as I talked over the years about the details of the project. Instead, I appreciate that she has allowed me to be absent. To her I send these letters.    acknowledgments ...

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