Acknowledgments
This volume developed from a seminal conference on this topic held at the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities (IKGF) at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg in June 2019, organized by the two co-editors, who were both fellows of the IKGF at that time, with the essential support of the IKGF’s administrative coordinator, Petra Hahm. The conference brought together a number of international scholars on this field: Daniel Burton-Rose, Philip Clart, Fan Chun-wu 范純武, Vincent Goossaert, Janet Hoskins, Hu Jiechen 胡劼辰, Paul R. Katz, Michael Lackner, Li Guoping 李國平, Luo Dan 羅丹, Xia Shi, Shiga Ichiko 志賀市子, Matthias Schumann, Elena Valussi, Wang Chien-chuan 王見川, and Zhu Mingchuan 朱明川. All of the participants and their presentations were essential to the success of the conference. While not all of the papers were included in the final book, we wish to acknowledge everyone’s contribution. We also wish to thank the conference attendees, especially Terry Kleeman, Barend ter Haar and Fabrizio Pregadio, for their valuable input. Moreover, we wish to thank the IKGF, particularly its director Michael Lackner (who originally proposed the idea of organizing such a conference to us), for the inspiration and continued support of this endeavor. We would also like to express our gratitude to our language-editor Dr. Sue Casson as well as the research assistants Dr. Li Gang and Carolin Tzschentke for their meticulous work, which saved us from numerous errors and oversights. Finally, we are grateful to Patricia Radder and Bart Nijsten for their efforts and swift work during the publication process.
Matthias Schumann & Elena Valussi
January 2023