Acknowledgements
We should like to record that the research leading to these results has been partly funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, grant agreement no. 810141, project EuQu: “The European Qurʾan. Islamic Scripture in European Culture and Religion 1150–1850”, of which the project leader is Mercedes García-Arenal (CSIC Madrid). Because of our shared interest in the Lead Books we coincided in the course of the years on many occasions with her and Fernando Rodríguez Mediano in conferences and meetings and enjoyed our conversations and exchanges of ideas. We should also like to thank our friend and colleague, the late professor Leonard Patrick (Pat) Harvey, who in the course of the years followed our work and contributed to it by his observations, suggestions, and critical remarks.
We thank Nanda de Groot of the University of Amsterdam for preparing our digital photos of the Lead Books for publication, and Consuelo López-Morillas for her meticulous correction of the style of our work, and for her suggestions. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable remarks and comments.
We would like to express our thanks to our esteemed friends at the Archive of the Sacromonte, María Luisa García Valverde and Antonio López Carmona of the University of Granada, who have been a great help during our research. We are grateful to the staff of the archives and libraries in which we have done our research ever since we have worked on this project.
We have visited the archive of the Sacromonte numerous times, and we have always received a warm welcome, first by the then archivist, D. Vicente Redondo, to whom we are very grateful for helping us time and again. We should like, finally and once again, to express our deepest gratitude to His Eminence the then archbishop of Granada, Francisco Javier Martínez Fernández, and to D. Juan Sánchez Ocaña, the former archivist of the Sacromonte Archive, for having facilitated our work during all these years and for his friendship. Acknowledgement is also due to the Brill editors and the Numen Book series, in particular the assistant editors for Religious Studies, Rashmi Shetty and Boris van Gool. Pieter te Velde has been helpful during the production process.
Finally, we are grateful to our families, who have lived with this research project ever since we began it.