Acknowledgments
Among the pleasures of finishing a book is the opportunity to thank those people and institutions who generously provided various types of support during the long process. Alice Donohue, Christiane Joost-Gaugier, and the late Barbara Barletta gave of their time and expertise in the early stages of the project. Near the projectâs end two anonymous reviewers for Brill provided valuable insights on how to improve the text.
A sabbatical leave from Wayne State University allowed for the initial work to be undertaken. And at its end, a research grant from the Dean of the College of Fine, Performing and Communication Arts at Wayne State allowed for the purchase of a large number of the images that the book required.
Amanda Faehnel, Special Collections and Archives, Kent State University Libraries kindly arranged for me to examine and photograph the universityâs copy of the Illustrium imagines.
Those museums and libraries which have digitized and made available their collections have enormously reduced the amount of time a project like this would have required to visit multiple institutions to read texts or examine objects in their collections. In particular, the images here from early texts, including the imagines, are from the Staatsbibliotek, Munich. Similarly, the collections of the American Numismatic Society, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and the Bodleian Library, Oxford have adopted the policy of making freely available for scholarly publication photographs of objects in their collections. Many of the objects used in this book are from their collections.
Finally, there is a debt which touches all time and stages of work involved in this book to Sarah Bassett for the wit, humor, insights and love.