Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of parts of this book have been published in the John Donne Journal, Word and Image, Études de Lettres, and Russell Hillier and Robert Reeder’s volume Comparative Essays on the Poetry and Prose of John Donne and George Herbert.

Much of the book was written in the context of the project “Space, Place and Image in the Poetry and Prose of John Donne”, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation from 2014–2018. Warm thanks to the SNSF for funding both this project and the Open Access publication of this book. I would like to thank my two doctoral students in that project, Kader Hegedüs and Sonia Saunier, for all their work, including their invaluable help in organising two international conferences and bringing the John Donne Society to Lausanne, but above all for developing and refining my ideas on Donne with their own scholarly work, as my current doctoral student, Ezra Benisty, continues to do.

The John Donne Society’s conference is a bright spark in my year. I am immensely grateful for the feedback and encouragement I’ve received when presenting my work there, and for the many friends I’ve made who have read drafts and/or generally supported me, including but not only Greg Kneidel, Sean McDowell, Maria Salenius, Jeanne Shami, Achsah Guibbory, Brent Nelson, Kimberly Johnson, Jeff Johnson, Laura Yoder and Heather Dubrow.

The English Department of the University of Lausanne has been my academic home for twenty-five years; I would like to thank all my colleagues, past and present, who have made it such a congenial place to teach and research over the years, and a particular thank you to Neil Forsyth, without whom I would not have arrived here. I have presented work in this book at the conferences of both the Swiss Association for University Teachers of English and the Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies, and salute the lively scholarly community of English studies in Switzerland. Another source of scholarly exchange and support is my participation in the SNSF-funded project “Poetry in Notions” – thanks to my project colleagues in English, French, German and Hispanophone poetry in Lausanne, Fribourg and Cergy Paris. Thanks to my colleagues in the Décanat of the Faculté des Lettres from 2021–2024 who have shown me that administrative responsibilities can be mixed with laughter and good will, and even leave a sliver of time for research. Thanks also to the earlier Décanat and Direction of the University who granted me a sabbatical leave in 2015 as well as two teaching load reductions, all of which contributed to the completion of this book.

It has been a real pleasure to work with Elizabeth McDonald at Boydell & Brewer. Her enthusiasm for the book and her care and attention to detail made the final furlong much easier than it might have been. Thanks also to the anonymous reader particularly for their helpful suggestions regarding structure. The image on the cover is thanks to a suggestion from Antoinina Bevan Zlatar.

Thanks to my mother, Moira Burgess and my brother, Peter Stirling, and to Lucy Perry for the haven of Friday nights. And thanks to Ian MacKenzie who has been there all through the long writing of this book, thanks for sharing in the epiphanies in many European and American art galleries and above all thanks for the painstaking reading and re-reading of every word!