Acknowlegments

I wish to express my appreciation for those friends, colleagues, and institutions which gave me assistance and support during the course of this project, only some of whom I cite here by name. My work on the Life of Symeon the Fool began as a doctoral dissertation in the Religions of Late Antiquity at Princeton University, directed by John Gager and Peter Brown, with sustained input from Martha Himmelfarb. I thank the three of them for fostering my scholarship with their particular talents as teachers, interlocutors, and friends. In a later stage of the project Peter again lent assistance in his role as series editor for the University of California Press.

The revision of the manuscript involved much reworking and rethinking. I am especially grateful to Georgia Frank, who read my draft chapter by chapter through the summer of 1993, ever patient both with me and with Priority Mail. Her careful combing of the manuscript and inspired suggestions for improvement have made this a much better book. A number of other colleagues read the entire manuscript at some point and made suggestions for its improvement, including Kathleen McVey, Susan Harvey, Robert Wilken, Robert Doran, and Vincent Déroche. These scholars spared me many errors of fact and helped me to hone my argument. Many of their suggestions I followed; others, for reasons of my own, I did not.

At key stages in the development of my work I had valuable conversations with and received helpful advice from Susan Harvey, Evelyne Patlagean, Claudia Rapp, Judith Herrin, Leslie MacCoull, Alexander Kazhdan, Eric Perl, Nancy Ševčenko, Susanna Elm, and fellow Cyprus enthusiast Annemarie Weyl Carr. Nick Trakakis kindly shared his translation of a section of the Life of Symeon.

I am indebted to Elizabeth Clark for her commitment to fostering the work of younger scholars and for her friendship and hospitality in the North Carolina Piedmont and to Henry Levinson, Head of the Religious Studies Department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, for his vision of the humanities and his sense of humor about the tensions inherent in the designation “teacher-scholar.” Further afield I thank the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute (CAARI) in Nicosia and its director, Stuart Swiny, for hospitality and travel tips during my visit to Cyprus in the spring of 1993.

I also wish to thank my student Jeff Richey, who assisted diligently in the preparation of the manuscript, and Mary Lamprech, Rebecca Bauer, Tony Hicks, and Alice Falk of the University of California Press, who have offered expert guidance in readying this book for publication. Howard Rhodes produced the index.

I acknowledge financial support provided for my research and writing by a Junior Fellowship in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in 1990–91 and Summer Excellence Research Grants from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1992 and 1994.

Finally I thank Gene Rogers, who contributed to this project in many ways, for his support, patience, and companionship.