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Acknowledgments This is a book about imaginary books, and the assistance of many people has been required for it to make its own leap from imaginariness to reality. At the very beginning of this project’s life, Marjorie Garber, Barbara Lewalski, and Stephen Greenblatt oversaw my research and helped me ask the right questions . Near the end, several scholars offered crucial advice, whether small or large in scale, that enabled this project to turn, finally, into a book: Ann Blair, Sheila Cavanagh, Jane Degenhardt, William Germano, Tanya Pollard, Elizabeth Spiller, Douglas Trevor, and Tiffany Werth. In the long in-­ between, many friends, mentors, and colleagues have made important contributions to my thinking about these texts and these ideas, including Caroline Bicks, Hélène Bilis, Scott Black, Gina Bloom, Mary Baine Campbell, Tom Conley, Catherine Field, the late Richard Helgerson, Wendy Beth Hyman, Miriam Jacobson, Clare Kinney, Sarah Knight, Mary Ellen Lamb, Kate Lancaster, James Marino, the late A. D. Nuttall, Richard Preiss, Marie Rutkoski, William Sherman, Lauren Shohet, Peter Stallybrass, Walter Stephens, Holger Schott Syme, Valerie Wayne, and William N. West. Discussions with members of the “Shakespearean Studies ” seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, led by William Carroll and Coppélia Kahn, and the same center’s seminar “Women and Culture in the Early Modern World,” led by Diana Henderson and Marina Leslie, have long been vital to the progress of my work and to my intellectual life generally. Diana Henderson and David Scott Kastan served as particularly important mentors to me during the whole researching and writing process. Diana Henderson has shown, through her extraordinary example, how to be a viii acknowledgments scholar, a leader, and a friend. And it was during a 1999 lecture by David Kastan , about duodecimo and sixteenmo editions of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, that I first asked myself the question that became the matter of this book: what is happening when the physical form of an early modern book signifies in ways separate from or in tension with its contents? Sections of chapters 2 and 4 appeared as an essay in the collection Staging Early Modern Romance: Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance, and Shakespeare, edited by Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne (New York: Routledge, 2008). They appear here, in altered form, with permission of the Taylor and Francis Group. I thank my colleagues at Wellesley College, especially, but not only, William Cain, Kathryn Lynch, James Noggle, Lisa Rodensky, and Margery Sabin, who have made the Department of English a welcoming and nurturing place for their junior Renaissance colleague. Members of the Wellesley Book Studies Initiative, Ruth Rogers, Katherine Ruffin, and Ray Starr, inspired me to keep asking questions about material texts. Grants from the department’s Keydel Fund and from Wellesley’s Committee on Faculty Awards supported my work on this book. My research assistant, Gabrielle Linnell, supplied important help and often found herself pressed into service as a sounding board. It would be impossible to acknowledge fully my great debt to my parents, John N. Wall and Terry Wall, both teacher-­ scholars. My gratitude for their support and their example is at least symbolized by the dedication to this book. Richard and Linda Randell have offered unstinting encouragement. Frances and Saurabh Jha have given many kinds of comfort and essential help, including harbor in their house, where I happily spent the very last days of work on this project. There is only one person, however, without whose continual, sustaining , manifold kindness this book truly could not have come into being: my husband, John Randell, who has witnessed every stage of its development and shared its every vicissitude. Our daughters, Julia and Beatrice, arrived toward the end of the writing of this book. They and their father have made this work possible in the different ways in which they have borne its many incursions into our domestic sphere: with impatience and with great patience, respectively. ...

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