To Repair the Ruins: Reading Milton

Acknowledgments

xi Acknowledgments We are grateful to Charles Durham, Kristin Pruitt, and Kevin Donovan for organizing the biannual Conference on John Milton in 2009 in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, from which all of the essays in To Repair the Ruins: Reading Milton originated as presentations . The conference, which began in 1991, with the help and guidance of John T. Shawcross, aims to represent a range of voices, from well-established Milton critics to new and emerging graduate student scholars. After a rigorous review process of the 85 papers presented at the 2009 conference, 12 were selected for publication with an eye to quality and thematic unity, and we then invited the authors to expand and revise their papers to their present full-length form. To Repair the Ruins: Reading Milton would not have been possible without Charley, Kris, and Kevin’s continued commitment to creating a collegial community and venue for Miltonists to share their ideas, opinions, and writing. We wish to thank Rebecca Totaro, Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies series editor, and Susan Wadsworth-Booth and Kathy Meyer at Duquesne University Press, as well as the press’s readers whose comments on the original manuscript were especially thorough and thoughtful. We are grateful also to Heather Williams at Western Carolina University for her bibliographical research, and Josie Javens and Mai Xiong for their editorial assistance. Thank you to Suzanne Jones and the rest of the University of Richmond English Department for their material support and encouragement and to Emily Poore for her superb assistance with a number of important administrative tasks. ...