Acknowledgements
Any project such as this involves many debts. I am grateful to the Social Sciences Research Council of Canada for providing funding for my work on Benedict’s Passion and Miracles and the Thomas Becket miracle windows of Canterbury Cathedral, and to Janet Friskney for helping me craft a successful SSHRC application. My colleagues in the history department of York University in Toronto, particularly Marlene Shore, Margaret Schotte, Jennifer Bonnell, Deborah Neill, Richard Hoffman, Tom and Libby Cohen, Joan Judge, Marlee Couling, Barry Torch, and Ludia Bae, have provided much support and encouragement. So have my colleagues at the Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies, with special thanks to James Carley and Ann Hutchison, and to a former PIMS Mellon Fellow, now medieval and early modern librarian of the Wellcome Collection in London, Elma Brenner. Like all medievalists living in Toronto, I have been blessed to be able to draw on the extraordinary resources of the PIMS library: long may it flourish.
John Van Engen helped this project get off the ground and saw it through to completion. I am very grateful for his friendship and for his continuing mentorship of his long-graduated student. Shelagh Sneddon reviewed the entire translation for accuracy, provided numerous corrections, and also caught biblical echoes that I had missed. I am so thankful for her help. John Jenkins generously read and commented on the entire translation, saving me from errors and providing a great deal of practical aid and information. Anne Duggan has led the way in so much Becket scholarship. Her interest in my work, which began when I was just starting out as an assistant professor, has meant a great deal. This translation is indebted to her path-breaking publications on the manuscripts of Benedict’s Miracles.
My work on Benedict’s Passion and Miracles has progressed in tandem with a major project re-examining the glorious stained glass picturing Becket’s miracles in Canterbury Cathedral. My colleagues at the cathedral, particularly Léonie Seliger and the glaziers of the stained glass conservation studio, Cressida Williams and the cathedral archivists, and Caroline Plaisted and the many wonderful Friends of Canterbury Cathedral, have cheered this translation on and patiently waited for its appearance. My academic colleagues in Canterbury, particularly Sheila Sweetinburgh and Emily Guerry, have gone above and beyond to support my work and make Canterbury feel like home, as have my generous hosts, Simon and Mary Brown.
Over the course of my career, I have tried out my ideas about Benedict’s Miracles in numerous conference presentations, lectures, essays, and journal articles. The venues, audiences, editors, and reviewers are too numerous to name here, but I am very grateful for their input. The comments and suggestions of the anonymous reviewer at Boydell Press and the careful reading of Caroline Palmer have brought this work to publication.
Friends and family members have seen this project through over the past decade. I am especially thankful to Jeanne Petit, Linda and Rick Groen, and my brother Ryan Koopmans. My parents, Sherwin and Karen Koopmans, read and commented on the introduction and very generously provided more than two-thirds of the cost for this text to be made Open Access. They see this as “a gift to humanity.” I am very grateful for that and for the innumerable gifts they have given to me.
I dedicate this translation to the memory of three dear and much-missed friends taken before their time: Kathleen McGarvey, Bridget Chérie Harper, and Nora Faires. I have thought of them often as I have translated these stories.