Acknowledgements
This volume was long in the making. Its draft has travelled from Cambridge to the University of Western Australia and back. The editorial work was carried out with the support of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (project number CE110001011) and of the project ‘Genius before Romanticism: Ingenuity in Early Modern Art and Science’ funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement no 617391.
This book stemmed from an enthusiastic moment ‘In defence of Pliny’ with Rowan Tomlinson, whose has spent the past decade researching the early modern reception of Pliny in particular and Renaissance copia in general. Pliny was not merely the inaccurate source of fanciful information on the natural world, his disfigured text did not only vindicate the humanist condemnation of the carelessness of medieval scribes; it was also a poetic matrix and that needed to be said. We tried to say so in September 2012 at a conference on The Poetics and Epistemology of Natural History in Early Modern France / Poétique et épistémologie de l’histoire naturelle en France, hosted by Newnham college, where I was then a junior research fellow: I am very grateful to Newnham college for its support.
Most articles in this volume developed from papers given at this conference: I wish to thank all the conference contributors and participants, including Kathryn Murphy, who kindly suggested that Intersections would be a natural home for it. I am also grateful to contributors who agreed to board ship at a later stage: Myriam Marrache-Gouraud, Stéphane Schmitt, and my colleagues at the University of Western Australia, Sue Broomhall and Paul Gibbard.
For providing insightful comments over the past five years, I wish to thank Yasmin Haskell, Katrina O’Loughlin, Penelope Woods and Spencer Young in Perth, Tim Chesters, Alexander Marr, José Ramon Marcaida, and Richard Oosterhoff in Cambridge, Neil Kenny, Arlette Fruet and Bryn Garrod wherever I go.
Raphaële Garrod