Acknowledgments

I am much obliged to the many colleagues who gave freely and generously of their time to comment on drafts of one or multiple chapters of this book: Lieke Asma, Frederik Bakker, Eric Barreto, Martin de Boer, Lukas Bormann, Jan Bremmer, Drew Davis, Harmen Ghijsen, Bert Harrill, David Horrell, Brigitte Kahl, Andrew Langford, Margaret Mitchell, Teresa Morgan, Laura Nasrallah, Jermo van Nes, Karin Neutel, Valérie Nicolet, Jonathan Soyars, Peter Tomson, Michael Wolter, and anyone else I fear I may have inadvertently left out. I am deeply grateful to all of you for teaching me so much, for pointing out the many flaws in my work, and for helping me to sharpen my arguments. Your comments have been enormously helpful. This is true also of the feedback that I received from the participants in the VU NT Colloquium in Amsterdam, who kindly read and discussed the entire manuscript with me over the course of multiple sessions. Many chapters were also presented at my home institution, Radboud University. I thank my students and colleagues (especially Seth Bledsoe, Tom de Bruin, Carly Crouch, and Michael Kochenash) for their feedback and encouragement. I likewise benefited much from opportunities to discuss this project elsewhere. Research that led to this book was presented in lectures and papers in Bonn, Cambridge, Charlottesville, Chicago, Durham, Münster, New Haven, Princeton, and Rome. Many thanks to all who attended. I would like to thank Hermut Löhr for hosting me in Bonn in 2020/21 and Laura Nasrallah for welcoming me to Yale for a few weeks in the spring of 2024. These two research stays were instrumental in getting the project underway and moving it toward completion a number of years later. My stay in Bonn was funded by a Humboldt Research Fellowship and I am pleased to acknowledge the support of the Humboldt Stiftung, without which this book would probably never have seen the light of day. Leo van der Meij, Bradley Hansen, and Judson Chhakchhuak provided excellent and much appreciated research assistance at various points. In the final stages, the anonymous reviewers and the staff at the publisher and at the production company (Beatrice Rehl, Edgar Mendez, Abijith Krishnan, Trent Hancock, Mohanapriya Caliamourthy and their colleagues in various departments) offered valuable guidance and support. My sincerest thanks to all of them.