On Becoming God: Late Medieval Mysticism and the Modern Western Self

Acknowledgments

xi The initial idea and the first draft of this book was conceived, researched, and written up in collaboration with Katja Lehmann, who continued to comment on and guide its subsequent incarnations. The book in its final form is dedicated to her, without whom the whole project would not have been possible. The writing-up and revising process has been enabled by the generous support of a number of institutions. The DAAD funded a very productive research visit to the Sonderforschungsbereich Literatur und Anthropologie in Konstanz in 1999, which greatly assisted the initial orientation of the project. Gabriele Rahaman of the Leo Baeck Institute in London assisted me in tracking down a copy of Bertha Pappenheim’s In der Trödelbude. The completion of the first draft was made possible by a grant from the AHRB. I am also grateful to the Master and Fellows of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and the Provost and Fellows of Worcester College, Oxford, for their support of my leaves of absence, as well as to the Modern and Medieval Languages Faculty in Oxford, which funded a further sabbatical. Arne Grøn, Niklaus Largier, and Willemien Otten read the manuscript in its entirety. Drafts of chapters, summaries, and proposals were read and commented on by Pamela Sue Anderson, Peter and Christa Bürger, Claire Carlisle, Terence Cave, Georgia Christinidis, Michael Eskin, Jeffrey Hamburger, Tom Kuhn, Nigel Palmer, Alex Rehding , Ritchie Robertson, Ulinka Rublack, Manfred Weinberg, Tim Whitmarsh , and Charlotte Woodford as well as by various anonymous reviewers. I am grateful to all of them for their criticisms and suggestions. Finally, I Acknowledgments xii ■ Acknowledgments would like to thank the people at Fordham University Press who helped the book through the final stages: in particular Nicholas Frankovich for his careful copy editing; and, last but not least, Helen Tartar for backing the book. Earlier versions of material included in the book has been published as “Developing the Modern Concept of the Self: The Trial of Meister Eckhart ,” Telos, no. 116 (Summer 1999), 56–80; and “The Spiritual Autobiographies of Visionary Nuns and Their Dominican Confessors in Early Fourteenth-Century Germany,” in Autobiography by Women in German, ed. Mererid Puw Davies, Beth Linklater, and Gisela Shaw (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000), 35–51. The material has been substantially modified since its first publication. Thanks are also due to the MHRA and Maney Publishing for permission to reprint a revised version of material originally published as “Abandoning Selfhood with Medieval Mystics,” in Pre-Histories and Afterlives : Studies in Critical Method, ed. Anna Holland and Richard Scholar (London: Legenda, 2009), 29–44. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person who is speaking. —Henry D. Thoreau, Walden (1854) ...