Acknowledgements
We are grateful for numerous persons and institutions for supporting the production of this book. In particular, we want to express our gratitude to the anonymous reviewer of the book, whose valuable comments helped to improve the manuscript. We are indebted to Dr Clive Tolley for his patient work in editing the language of the book, to research assistant M. A. Lari Ahokas (‘Letters and Songs’, SKS) for carrying out the technical editing of most of the articles and to Barnaby Cullen for editing the USTC numbers. Liisi Kasuk drew three maps for the volume. Research assistant Pihla Pekonen (University of Helsinki, Faculty of Arts, Anu Lahtinen) prepared the index for the book. The book was supported by the Research Council of Finland projects no 288119, 308381 and 346342, and the Finnish Literature Society and the University of Helsinki have supported the work in various ways.
Over the years, encounters with the collaborative network of the project ‘Letters and Songs’, part of which has participated in the present volume as the authors, have been overwhelmingly supportive, which we are grateful for. We thank the authors for their brilliant work and pleasant collaboration. We are very grateful to Brill for accepting this book into the series Library of the Written Word. The chief editor of the series, Prof. Andrew Pettegree, kindly encouraged us to propose this volume in the series. In particular, we want to thank him, chief editor Dr. Arthur der Weduwen and associate editors Ivo Romein and Francis Knikker for support along the process.