Acknowledgements

This book grew out of my research at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, and at St Mary’s College, University of St Andrews. I am deeply grateful to both these institutions for their intellectual and financial support.

I have been fortunate to present papers and lectures on my ongoing research at Trinity College, Dublin; University of Göttingen; University of Notre Dame; University of Bristol; Warburg Institute, London; St John’s Seminary, Wonersh; University of Cambridge; University College Cork; and the Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts (ITIA), University of St Andrews. I am grateful for the questions, encouragements, and discussions with many scholars that emerged through those fora. An earlier and shorter version of Chapter 1 was published as ‘Moral Structure’, in The Cambridge Companion to Dante’s ‘Commedia’, edited by Zygmunt G. Barański and Simon Gilson (Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 61–78. Earlier versions of material included in Chapters 3–5 were previously published in the journals Medium Ævum (2014), The Thomist (2015), and Le tre corone (2017). I am grateful to the editors both for their readers’ comments and for permission to reprint material here.

Many other scholars and colleagues have supported me in numerous ways in researching and writing this book. I am deeply grateful to you all and I regret that, in these brief acknowledgements, I can thank only some of you by name: Zygmunt G. Barański, Theodore J. Cachey Jr., Edward Coleman, Mark Elliott, George Ferzoco, Roy Flechner, Simon Gilson, Robert Gordon, Jon P. Hesk, Claire Honness, Gavin Hopps, Margaret Anne Hutton, William P. Hyland, Tristan Kay, Robin Kirkpatrick, Rebekah Lamb, Anne Leone, John Marenbon, Franziska Meier, Christian Moevs, Vittorio Montemaggi, Daragh O’Connell, Ambrogio Camozzi Pistoja, Richard M. Pollard, Matthew Treherne, Sr Valery Walker, Heather Webb, Michael Wilkinson, and Judith Wolfe. More specifically, I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of the book manuscript, as well as Daniel Wakelin, general editor of the Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature series, for their comments and suggestions. I am grateful to Linda Bree, who took an initial interest in this book, and I have been particularly fortunate in having Emily Hockley, as commissioning editor, to guide me expertly through the publication process. I would like to thank Ishwarya Mathavan as project manager, Jill Hopps as copy editor, Giuseppe Pezzini for amending some of my Latin translations, and my father Patrick Corbett for picking up some further errors in the proofs. Finally, I would like to thank my wife Elizabeth, sine qua non, to whom this book is dedicated.