Acknowledgments

The saying goes: “it takes a village to raise a child.” It has taken the equivalent of a Renaissance Italian city-state to complete this translation.

I am grateful for Phillip Usher’s kind invitation to participate in the French Texts in Translation series, which began at AMS Press, and was given a new home at the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Press through the generous intervention of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Ayanna Thompson.

Many thanks to Roy Rukkila and Todd Halvorsen at ACMRS for their patient guidance of the publication process and to Juleen Eichinger for smoothing out phrasing, filling in gaps, and correcting errors with care. My thanks as well to Tonissa Saul for her support of the production process, to help bring it over the finish line.

I would never have had the courage to undertake this translation without the support of members of the Early Modern Conversions research team, particularly Paul Yachnin, project director, who with Bronwen Wilson guided and edited some of my early work on this project. I also want to express my gratitude to Valerie Traub for her guidance on questions of gender and to Peter Marshall, whose insight into historical matters was of inestimable value. John Sutton, Lyn Tribble, Patricia Badir, and Peggy McCracken offered intellectual fellowship, sympathy, and support when they were most needed. Marjorie Rubright, Stephen Wittek, and Torrance Kirby fostered inspiring scholarly interactions in the group. I cannot express adequately how important it was to have such impressive and compassionate interlocutors at the beginning of this project.

Invitations to speak about this project helped me to imagine an audience for this novel. I owe Ashley Byczkowski and Amy Graves gratitude for the support they gave me early on in this process.

This translation was largely completed thanks to the Mellon-Mowat Fellowship that brought me to the Folger Shakespeare Library in the fall of 2019. I owe so much to Amanda Herbert, whose exhortations to “rein it in” helped me to focus on what I needed to do; I am also eternally grateful for her support and patience. John Kuhn, Anna More, Seth Williams, Clarissa Chenovick, Faith Acker, Bénédicte Miyamoto, Sasha Handley, Liza Blake, Kathryn Vomero Santos, Farid Azfar, and Elad Carmel kept ideas buzzing around constantly, enabling everyone’s nerdy addictions to manuscripts and unusual printed books and images, evoking excitement at new finds every day, and keeping the humanity of the humanities thriving in our utopian space. Caroline Duroselle-Melish brought me books and works of art before I even knew I needed them, turning my work in new directions I never would have taken without her guidance. Leah Thomas encouraged my obsession with early modern fashion, frequently leaving books on my desk to answer obscure questions about sartorial practices. Heather Wolfe and David Goldstein mentored me with regards to dietary practices and foodways. Michele Silverman and Abbie Weinberg answered so many other questions, particularly about the contents of materials listed on those pesky pink acquisition slips in the card catalogue.… All of these people created a community of scholarly care that made it seem not only all right but also absolutely wonderful to obsess over details of early modern life.

I am also forever grateful to my dear friend Cynthia Keith for lodging me, feeding me, and supporting my work while I was at the Folger Shakespeare Library. I would not have made it through that fall without her help and guidance.

The translation workshop that Scott Francis and Bob Hudson organized gave me an exceptional opportunity to refine my work. An incredibly erudite and intelligent group of scholars guided revisions with unparalleled insight, because this is what happens when you get a group of seizièmistes together: the best kind of intellectual exchange, with ideas popping up, circulating around, and settling into just the right phrase or the perfect piece of information to frame the translation. My thanks to Scott and Bob, Mary McKinley, Andrea Frisch, Nicolas Russell, Jeff Persels, and Valerie Worth, who all went over the banquet scene in this novel with keen eyes, making this passage both more accurate and more readable.

I also wish to extend thanks to Lia Markey and Rebecca Fall, who invited me to present my work on the banquet scene in the novel, and who helped me access materials on lacework and on forestry in the Newberry Library, and thus to complete and revise important parts of the translation. My thanks to Paul Fleming and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell, for the grant that allowed me to travel to Chicago to do this research.

Revision of this translation would not have gone as well as it did without the advice and support of the writing group I have been part of for the last seven years. I give endless thanks to Marilyn Migiel for organizing this group, and to her as well as to Irene Eibenstein-Alvisi and Julia Karczewski for their excellent editorial guidance. Magdala Jeudy, Giulia Andreoni, Richard Gibbs, and Riccardo Samà also provided valuable insights and advice for revising this work.

This book contains many perspectives, if not worlds, and I needed the support of experts in a wide range of disciplines, so I extend great thanks to Walter Melion and Karl Enenkel, for their guidance on landscape as I prepared a chapter on The Island of Hermaphrodites for their volume on Landscape and the Visual Hermeneutics of Place. I offer thanks to Daniele Maira and Teodoro Patera for their advice as I navigated new territory relative to early modern gender for their volume on Mollesses renaissantes, and to Dorothea Heitsch and Jeremie C. Korta for guiding me through the convoluted space of this novel for their volume on Early Modern Visions of Space. I am very grateful to Paul Yachnin and Bronwen Wilson for their patient guidance as I worked through my ideas about this space as a generator of individual  and societal evolution and change for their volume on Conversion Machines. I want to express my deep gratitude to Jennifer Row and Tammy Berberi for including me in their project on Disability’s Worldmaking. Many thanks to Alexandra Onuf and Nicholas Ealy for helping me think through the grotesque for their volume on Violence, Trauma and Memory, and to Colette Winn and Julia Singer for guiding me through the complexities of Galenic dietetics in preparation for my participation in their special issue of Romanic Review on literature and medicine. I offer great thanks to Gary Ferguson for his continual advice and great insight relative to this novel and to the more general knowledge of Galenic dietetics I gained in preparing my entry for The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Renaissance World. Pauline Goul gave me superb guidance on early modern ecologies, as I worked through treatises on forestry for her special issue of the Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes on the environmental question. I owe enormous gratitude to Marc Schachter and John O’Brien not only for their continual scholarly mentoring but also for their support as I wrote about style and sedition for their volume on Sedition.

This book contains multitudes and has required the insight of so many people. I am so very grateful to be part of an intellectual community that focuses on sharing knowledge and lifting up fellow scholars.

The colleague who deserves the greatest thanks is Bob Hudson, who shepherded this translation through all its revisions and who provided insight and information I could never have discovered on my own. It is a delight to have colleagues who are both erudite and generous with their knowledge, and Bob is an exemplary member of this group of scholars, who all prove time and again that brilliance and benevolence can coexist in one person.

I must conclude with appreciation for my spouse, Douglas, who has patiently awaited, but also abetted, the completion of this project, listening as I groaned about the bad puns, convoluted rhetoric, and never-ending sentences that are so prevalent in early modern texts, providing solace as I despaired over finding the right wording, and sharing my joy when a passage turned out well. This book would not be entering the world without your constant sustaining of this project.