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These pages have profited greatly from the help and advice of friends who have read or listened to many drafts in progress. I especially thank Rebecca Bushnell, JoAnn Della Neva, Roland Greene, Timothy Hampton, Lyn Kelsey, Ignacio Navarrete, Deborah Parker, Richard Peterson, Anne Lake Prescott, and Alan K. Smith. I thank Katherine Reagan and the wonderful staff at Cornell ’s Karl A. Kroch Rare Book Library for facilitating my repeated access to its magnificent Willard Fiske Dante and Petrarch Collection. For their generous critique and unfailing encouragement of my work, I am indebted to nearly every member of Cornell’s departments of Medieval Studies and Comparative Literature and to colleagues from a half-dozen other departments who participate in Cornell’s Renaissance Colloquium. I am especially indebted to Calum M. Carmichael for providing splendid insight into the biblical texts I have quoted. I am continually grateful to Mary Lynch Kennedy for surmising that one advantage of having a spouse so obsessed with the past is that he’s apt to find you even more interesting the older you get. I am deeply grateful to the Rockefeller Foundation for a fellowship at the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, where I began revising my preliminary foul papers. I dedicate the result to two couples, the first of whom walked propitiously into my study the instant I laid down my pen on a reasonable fair copy and the second of whom walked bravely down the aisle as this book entered production at the Johns Hopkins University Press. I thank Trevor Lipscombe for his tact and resourcefulness as an editor, Elizabeth Gratch for her cheerful and keen-eyed work as a copy editor , and Tom Roche for his expert guidance as production editor. ix Acknowledgments This page intentionally left blank ...

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