Christina Wald - The Reformation of Romance: The Eucharist, Disguise, and Foreign Fashion in Early Modern Prose Fiction

Edited by
Lucia Kornexl, Ursula Lenker, Martin Middeke, Gabriele Rippl, Hubert Zapf

Advisory Board

Laurel Brinton, Philip Durkin, Olga Fischer, Susan Irvine, Andrew James Johnston, Christopher A. Jones, Terttu Nevalainen, Derek Attridge, Elisabeth Bronfen, Ursula K. Heise, Verena Lobsien, Laura Marcus, J. Hillis Miller, Martin Puchner

In a study about transformations, it is a particular pleasure to remember and name with gratitude the colleagues and friends whose generous help and advice greatly contributed to the various stages of this project. This book is a shortened and reshaped version of the Habilitation thesis that I completed at the University of Augsburg, and my first thanks go to my Augsburg colleagues, most of all to Martin Middeke, who supported this project through all its phases with his characteristic enthusiasm and sensitivity. The most substantial work on this project was done during a year-long postdoctoral fellowship at the Humanities Center at Harvard University. I would like to thank the VolkswagenStiftung for the generous support of the fellowship, my colleagues at Harvard, in particular Homi K. Bhabha, James Simpson, and Gordon Teskey for inspiring conversations, my co-fellows Andreas Fischer, Jean-Philippe Belleau, Detlef von Daniels and Nirvana Tanoukhi for their companionship and their good spirits, the Humanities Center team for welcoming us as they did, and the participants of the Renaissance Research Colloquium as well as my students for sharing many interesting insights. The VolkswagenStiftung and the Humanities Center also supported the conference Early Modern Reformations: Literature, Religion, Aesthetics that I organised at Harvard; I am indebted to all speakers and many participants of this conference for their contributions and their comments on my work, in particular to Sarah Beckwith, Brian Cummings, Tobias Dring, Deborah Shuger, James Simpson, Gordon Teskey, Mary Baine Campbell, Jonathan Hart, Martin Moraw, Claudia Olk, and Jason Zysk.

I would like to thank Verena Lobsien for discussing my work in Frankfurt and for her later thought-provoking comments on my writing, Elisabeth Bronfen for our inspiring conversations in Zurich, Ingrid Hotz-Davies for our encouraging meeting in Munich, Steve Mullaney for our talk in Stratford-upon-Avon, and Stephen Greenblatt and Ramie Targoff for our dialogue in Rome, possibly the most congenial place to discuss Eucharistic matters. I would also like to thank Tobias Dring, Roger Ldeke, Bjrn Quiring, and Claudia Richter for supporting this project in its earlier stages, and in particular Gordon McMullan for inviting me to London. I am also grateful to my colleagues at the Humboldt-Universitt Berlin for their support during the final stages of preparing this book.

Many of the ideas of this study have been presented at conferences and in seminars, and for their invitations, support, and criticism, my thanks are due to Andreas Hfele and the participants of the Literary Colloquium at Munich, Stefan Brnchen, Georg Mein and the participants of the conference Weltliche Wallfahrten at the University of Luxemburg, Isabel Karremann, Jonathan Baldo and the participants of the seminar Forgetting Faith? at the Annual Conference of the Shakespeare Association of America in Boston, and Emily Sherwood, Sarah Lewis, and the participants of the conference at Kings College on Transforming Early Modern Identities. Earlier versions of parts of chapters 1 and 2 appeared in Narrative Developments from Chaucer to Defoe (eds. Gerd Bayer and Ebbe Klitgrd. New York: Routledge, 2011), Weltliche Wallfahrten: Die Suche nach dem Realen (eds. Stefan Brnchen and Georg Mein. Mnchen: Fink, 2010) and Anglistentag 2008 Tbingen: Proceedings (eds. Lars Eckstein and Christoph Reinfandt. Trier: WVT, 2009).

I am very grateful to Sofia Meyers, Charles Marcrum, Martin Riedelsheimer, Georg Hauzenberger, Anja Haslinger, Bianka Kretschmer, and Fabian Baier for the painstaking care they have taken with the various stages of this manuscript. I would also like to thank the editors of the Anglia book series who accepted my monograph proposal and the team at De Gruyter.

For sharing (and causing) the transformations in my personal life, my most heartfelt thanks go to Markus Scheumann, Hans Jonathan and Heinrich David Wald to whom this book is dedicated.