Acknowledgements
This book was first published in Germany in 2016 as a revised version of a text prepared at the Gotha Research Centre of the University of Erfurt, directed by Martin Mulsow. The publication of this English translation was made possible by the Geisteswissenschaften International prize awarded in 2019 to the German edition by the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the Federal Foreign Office, and VG WORT. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Marcel Simon-Gadhof and Johannes Kambylis of Felix Meiner Verlag for nominating the book, and to the members of the jury (L. Giuliani, T. Allert, B. Budrich, A. Cammann, P. Gassert, J. N. Howe, D. Kaufmann, C. Menke, G. Meynen, M. Rethmeier, J. Voss) who generously decided to fund the translation. It was a great pleasure to be able to rely on the work of a translator like Gwendolin Goldbloom. Unless stated otherwise, she is also responsible for the translation of all the quotations from the eighteenth-century German sources. An important contribution to this publication was also made by Alastair Hamilton, who encouraged me to propose the book to this series, and by the editor Ingrid Heijckers-Velt, who supported the publication process with precision and expertise.
Rome, October 2021