Acknowledgements
The contributions and authors of this volume have made this book’s journey a pleasant one, dispersed across the world and working together toward this encouraging final outcome: The contributors were chosen in part by direct request, in part by way of a call for papers with far more responses than could be included. A conference was initially planned in Istanbul, but technical problems resulted in a transfer to the FU Berlin – and even there, a personal meeting ultimately did not happen, due to the global pandemic. However, all text travelers kept strong and discussed the pre-circulated papers in a digital meeting across four different time zones. The only advantage of this COVID-ized digital form of exchange was that people from many countries who could never have come to Berlin just to be part of the audience could now click and enter the meeting room – we thank them for their interest and their comments and questions during the discussion! To improve the outcome, I decided that in addition to my own reading and comments of the chapters as editor, I would ask external reviewers to read and comment in a double-blind form on each of the chapters (as well as on two which ultimately did not make their way into the volume). The direct identification of the given reviewer for each chapter shall not be revealed here, but since this is no journal, I might name the reviewers here in a pure alphabetical order, just to express my and our gratitude for their work which was done in a good spirit of open criticism. Four to six extra eyes saw more than I alone, and the double-blind process opened the way for clear words. The alphabetical order of the reviewers might not prevent all guesses as to which reviewer might have been assigned which article, but the anonymity was kept strict during the process itself and remains still not fully revealed in this form. I have to thank Prof. Alan Mikhail for choosing the two reviewers for my own chapter; their anonymity must remain intact in this case so that no reviewed can claim to know certainly who has reviewed his or her chapter. But also those two unnamed are fully included in this expression of gratitude: Dr. Roxane Argyropoulos, Prof. Antonio Clericuzio, Dr. Marco Dogo, Prof. Elena Frangakis-Syrett, Dr. Aurélien Girard, Dr. Matthieu Grenet, Dr. Stefan Hanß, Prof. Daniel Hershenzon, Prof. Bernd Heyberger, Dr.des. Fredrik Kämpe, Prof. Hans-Martin Krämer, Prof. Jan Loop, Prof. David von Mayenburg, Prof. Ulrich Mönnig, Prof. William O’Reilly, Prof. Jordan Sand, Prof. Henning Sievert, Prof. Hillard van Thiessen, Prof. Gillian Weiss. Certainly, once formally accepted, the authors alone remained responsible for their texts, and retained the freedom to respond to our advice and suggestions as they chose. The English editing of the contributions by non-native speakers has been done quickly and precisely by Dr.des. Mallory Hope and Dr.des. Burton Westermeier. Funding has been provided by the DFG Heisenberg-Grant GZ Zw 164-8/1. My gratitude goes, first of all, to all contributors who remained faithful together in this nomadic multilocal enterprise, accepting critical remarks, commenting on each other’s papers and thereby strengthening the links between each chapter. At Brill, my thanks goes as usual to Arjan van Dijk, Ivo Romein and Gera van Bedaf as well as the typesetting team.