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䡲 䡲 䡲 Acknowledgments My thanks go first and foremost to my advisers Michael Cook and William Jordan , with whom I had the good fortune to study at Princeton. Graduate school was for me a challenging, rewarding, frustrating, and often humbling experience, but both of my advisers not only gave me the tools to begin to ask the questions in which I was interested, but also, through their examples, impressed upon me the full potential of being a scholar. In two separate seminars that they offered, I caught the first glimpses of what led me to this rather peculiar topic. I am especially grateful to Michael Cook for his patience and his exceedingly generous comments, suggestions, and corrections. I would also like to thank Andras Hamori and Abraham Udovitch for their scholarship and counsel. Conceived in Princeton, this project came into the world in Madrid, in the Department of Arabic Studies at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciónes Científicas . During an initial visit in the summer 2002 and then again for a year in 2003–4, I benefited from the warm and collegial atmosphere I found there and from conversations with Elena de Felipe, Maribel Fierro, Mercedes García-Arenal, Rashid Hour, Manuela Marín, Fernando Mediano, Cristina de la Puente, and Delfina Serrano . I am indebted to Maribel Fierro for her ongoing support, her numerous references , her comments, her time, and in general for helping a clueless American graduate student find his way through the scholarship on al-Andalus. In addition, I am grateful to Cristina Álvarez Millán for her advice and support during my initial attempts to understand plague treatises. Finally, during my first summer in Spain, I was blessed by the hospitality of Sofía Torallas-Tovar and by her friendship during both that summer and the year I returned to Spain. This project was improved by the feedback of numerous friends and colleagues , including Najam Haider, Toby Jones, Ben Lerner, Judith Loebenstein, and Nathalie Peutz. I also profited from the comments, generosity, and advice of Jocelyn Hendrickson, Sayeed Rahman and (again!) Nathalie Peutz. I would like to profoundly thank the first anonymous reader for the Johns Hopkins University Press, who took the time to offer corrections and improvements on every page of the manuscript. I have tried to resolve the issues raised by the second anonymous reader, for whose careful reading of the manuscript I am similarly grateful. I wish to express as well my deep gratitude to Jacqueline Wehmueller of the Johns Hop- xvi Acknowledgments kins University Press for her support, her patience, and her guidance through the process of turning manuscript pages into a book. Finally, I am indebted to Lois Crum for her detailed and patient copyediting of the manuscript. She improved the text immensely. During the past five years, my academic home has been the Religion Department at Middlebury College, and I am truly grateful to have been part of such a warm and collegial environment. During this time, I not only have begun to learn how to teach but have also been stimulated by conversation with my colleagues and, most of all, with my students. Since I began work on the subject of contagion, it has followed me from Egypt, Yemen, New Zealand, Spain, and Morocco to Vermont. My constant companion has been my wife, Nathalie Peutz, to whom I am grateful for so much more than academic support. Without her presence, little in these years would have made much sense at all. In the past three years our son Mataio has had many opportunities to turn and run out of his father’s office when faced with perilously teetering piles of books related to this project, or to ask me “Why?” when I say that I am going to work now. I can only hope that he will continue to remind me of what Gary Snyder has called “the real work.” ...

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