Acknowledgments

This study began as a doctoral dissertation funded by the Gates Cambridge Trust and was reworked during a Research Fellowship at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. I accumulated many debts of gratitude during my years in Cambridge. Above all, I would like to thank Helen Cooper for being the most supportive, inspiring, and intellectually generous doctoral supervisor I could have hoped for. Special thanks are also due to Laura Ashe and Siobhain Calkin for reading and commenting on chapter drafts, and to Corinne Saunders and Nicolette Zeeman, my doctoral examiners, for providing feedback that helped me sharpen my ideas and better understand what this book is about. For their friendship and encouragement, I am grateful to Aliya Bagewadi, Vaibhav Bhardwaj, Hanna Baumann, Andrew Chen, Kate Crowcroft, Matthias Goetz, Christoph Grossbaier, Natasha Magnani, and Milan Pajic.

The Department of English at Yale University, my academic home for the past three and a half years, has offered a supportive and stimulating environment in which to finish this book. I am especially grateful to Ardis Butterfield, Jessica Brantley, and Emily Thornbury for welcoming me into the community of medievalists, for consistently offering (or agreeing) to read my work, and for their wise counsel. I have benefited immensely from their mentorship. Feisal Mohamed provided valuable feedback on an entire draft of this book, and Cajetan Iheka on a version of the introduction. My sincere gratitude goes to both. For conversations about or around this book, I thank Joe Cleary, Hussein Fancy, Marta Figlerowicz, Ben Glaser, Naomi Levine, Ernest Mitchell, Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, Stephanie Newell, Cathy Nicholson, and Joe North. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences generously funded a manuscript workshop that brought together Suzanne Akbari, Chris Chism, and Cecilia Gaposchkin, to whom I am deeply indebted for reading an earlier version of this study and supplying incisive, constructive criticism. Yale also provided valuable support in the form of a Morse Fellowship and a Publication Grant from the Whitney Humanities Center.

Two anonymous reviewers appointed by Cambridge University Press offered feedback that considerably enriched the manuscript. I cannot thank them enough for their time and attention. I also wish to extend profound gratitude to Emily Hockley, Alastair Minnis, Dan Wakelin, and Marisa Galvez for their commitment to this book and editorial support. In the later stages of the book, Claire Adler, Claire Crow, and Celine Vezina helped format the footnotes and check the quotations and references; I thank them too. I am also grateful to New Medieval Literatures and Studies in Philology for permission to reuse previously published material: roughly half of Chapter 2 appeared in an earlier form in “Mixed Feelings in the Middle English Charlemagne Romances: Emotional Reconfiguration and the Failures of Crusading Practices in the Otuel Texts,” New Medieval Literatures 16 (2016), 172–212; and Chapter 4 substantially reworks a few paragraphs that appeared in “Violence, Excess, and the Composite Emotional Rhetoric of Richard Coeur de Lion,” Studies in Philology 114:1 (2017), 1–38. My final academic acknowledgment is to two remarkable scholars and teachers, Marco Nievergelt and Denis Renevey, who sparked my interest in medieval literature and encouraged me to apply for graduate programs.

My academic trajectory, this book, and pretty much everything else would not have been possible without the inspiration and unwavering support of my parents, Peter and Jane. My sisters – Tamara, Lisa, and Lana – have sustained and encouraged me over the years. Their partners – Antoine, Raphael, and Mike – have offered their interest and encouragement along the way. Gunda, Bernhard, and Emil, my in-laws, welcomed me into their family and provided vital assistance during our transition from England to the United States via Germany. My singular gratitude, finally, to my wife, Gesa, for her love, companionship, fierce intelligence, and boundless energy; and to my sons, Aaron and Jonah, for the happiness they bring to me every day.

With Gesa, Aaron, and Jonah, I have shared the greatest joys and deepest sorrows. This book is for Esme, beloved daughter and sister, who was born and died as I completed it.