Acknowledgments
The present work is a revision of my 2021 doctoral dissertation completed at Florida State University under the supervision of David Levenson. While the dissertation began with a rapid pace of research and writing in 2019, finishing it was a laboriously slow process as a result of the birth of my twin daughters and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, more or less simultaneously. I owe countless thanks to David for the many late nights spent on Zoom calls, without which the dissertation would never have been completed and the current monograph would never have materialized. I am also grateful for the contributions of the other committee members, Matthew Goff, Nicole Kelley, and Trevor Luke. Although for a brief time I was so fatigued with the dissertation that I thought I might never wish to return to it again in the future, some of the committee’s suggestions led me in new and exciting directions that ultimately manifested in the present book.
Throughout the revisions of the dissertation and the new research and writing I benefited greatly from conversations with Carson Bay and Eelco Glas. My anonymous JSJSup reviewers also supplied extremely helpful feedback. A condensed version of a combination of Chapters 2 and 5 is being published separately in an edited volume and was read by Jan Willem van Henten, Michael Avioz, and Carson Bay. I am grateful for their feedback as well. Small parts of Chapter 4 were expanded into a new essay for an edited volume, the research and writing of which resulted in further improvements to the present book. I thank Viktor Kókai-Nagy for that invitation and Eelco Glas for the recommendation which elicited it. The editors for the series in which this book appears, Karina Hogan and René Bloch, were also extremely helpful and supportive in guiding this project. I cannot but mention the various conversations with colleagues in the Florida State University Department of Religion over the year or so working on the book, as well as the help of Tommy Woodward in compliling the indices. Finally, I owe thanks to my parents, who always supported my education, which seemed never-ending at times, and my wife and daughters, who are the reasons for which any of what I write matters.
David Edwards
Tallahassee, Florida
January 2023