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Acknowledgments It seems appropriate that a book concerned with the art of thanksgiving should require so many gestures of thanks to the various individuals and institutions that have made it possible. To begin with, I would like to acknowledge that this project was made possible by doctoral and postdoctoral funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am very grateful to Mary Silcox, who not only helped oversee the project as a Ph.D. dissertation at McMaster University, but who generously continued to read parts of the manuscript as it developed beyond its initial stages. I would also like to thank Sylvia Bowerbank, who instilled in me a love of the difference that early modern culture makes while expertly supervising this project in its dissertation stages. I am also grateful to David Clark, whose keen knowledge of literary theory proved invaluable to me during the dissertation process. Thanks also go to Richard Rambuss for his insightful comments on the dissertation version of the manuscript and for helping make early modern devotional writing such an exciting field in which to work. I am most grateful to Marshall Grossman and the Department of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, for supporting my postdoctoral fellowship through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which made the revision of this project possible. I have greatly enjoyed the benefits of Dr. Grossman’s enviable wit and rigorous intellect. I am also grateful to James A. Knapp for turning me onto the joys of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and for many inspiring conversations about early modern culture. Nicholas Halmi and James Alsop offered helpful comments on parts of the early manuscript. Thanks also to Howard Jones for generously sharing his knowledge of seventeenth century Latin with me. To Erin E. Kelly I am grateful for xi xii Acknowledgments many things, including her sharp editorial eye and profound generosity. Most of all, I am grateful to the anonymous reader at Duquesne University Press for offering excellent criticism of the manuscript. Thanks also to Albert C. Labriola, Susan Wadsworth-Booth and Kathy Meyer for the time and expertise they devoted to the editing of this book. I would also like to acknowledge the moral and financial support offered by the Canadian Association of Graduate Studies, the Dalley Fellowship, the Marion Northcott Schweitzer Travel Bursary, the Buchanan Bounty Trust Book Prize, and McMaster University. A number of libraries have been essential to me in writing this book, including Mills University Library at McMaster University; Robarts Library, St. Michael’s Library, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, and Trinity Library, all of the University of Toronto; The Folger Shakespeare Library; McKelden Library at the University of Maryland, College Park; The Newberry Library in Chicago; and The British Library. An early version of the final section of chapter 1, appeared in Mosaic, a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature, as “Southwell’s ‘A Vale of Tears’: A Psychoanalysis of Form,” in Mosaic 34, no. 1 (March 2001): 107–20. An early version of chapter 3 appeared as “Embodiment and Representation in John Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions,” in Prose Studies 24, no. 2 (August 2001): 15–40. Prose Studies’ website can be found at http://www.tandf.co.uk. And an early version of chapter 4 appears in Symbolism: An International Journal of Critical Aesthetics 4 (2003), 63–98. I am grateful to the editors of these journals for allowing me to reproduce this material. A portion of the conclusion is from my essay, “Traherne’s Specters: Self-Consciousness and Its Others,” in New Essays on Thomas Traherne, ed. Jacob Blevins, Renaissance and Medieval Texts Series (Arizona State University Press). ...

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