Acknowledgments

It is always a pleasure to recognize those who help build a scholarly project and bring it to fruition. This volume, from the start, was begun in collaboration, first between Anne Lester and Laura Morreale, when we began preparing the Account-Inventory for inclusion in the online digital humanities project on the Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe (DALME). The book then expanded to encompass a wider translation circle, with Anne E. Lester, Laura K. Morreale, Caroline Smith, and Anne Latowsky, as we turned to include the poems of Rutebeuf. This elaborate collaboration started in the darker and lonelier days of the pandemic when we sought consolation and a shared intellectual space with colleagues and friends. Dedicated weekly and biweekly meetings to transcribe, edit, and translate became the core of the collaboration and brought all of us great inspiration, escape from the doldrums of everyday life at home, and renewed intellectual vigor—a spark kindled by coming together to do the work medievalists do with manuscript and archival source material. In those difficult times, our work together was and remains a source of joy, filled with rabbit holes and research tangents that led us across our academic disciplines and that greatly enriched the whole.

In March 2021, Lester and Morreale convened an online symposium dedicated to reading and understanding Eudes of Nevers’s Account-Inventory. We thank the History Department, the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, and the Medieval World Seminar at Johns Hopkins University for sponsoring that event, which was attended by over 150 participants. We thank Sharon Farmer, Andrew Jotischky, Richard Leson, Maureen Miller, Jonathan Rubin, and Caroline Smith for taking part in that event and for contributing short essays to this volume, and Uri Shachar for adding his contribution thereafter. We thank Daniel Lord Smail for moderating the event and are grateful to the audience in attendance, many of whom offered extremely useful questions and feedback in the chat and in email correspondence afterward. We wish to thank in particular Jaroslav Folda and Elizabeth A. R. Brown for their insights about the creation, copying, and survival of the rolls.

The staff of the Archives nationales, especially Jean-François Moufflet and Dimitri Douillot, were extremely helpful in securing high-quality digital photos of the rolls during the COVID lockdown, and in allowing us to see and photograph the rolls in the archives in Paris the following March 2022. And we are grateful for permission to reproduce images of the rolls here and online. We would also like to acknowledge the National Endowment for the Humanities, which supported Lester with a Faculty Fellowship during the 2020–21 year that facilitated time away from teaching and supported the research and writing of this book.

Many other colleagues have helped along the way. We thank in particular William Chester Jordan, Nicholas Paul, Daniel Lord Smail, and Tamer el-Leithy, who kindly fielded questions over email and in conversation that clarified specific points and difficult issues that dogged us as we worked. Winston Black taught us about the exact uses of certain medicinal remedies, Mark Cruse shared his knowledge of foreign relations between French forces and those they encountered in the east, and Stephanie J. Lahey and Lisa Fagin Davis helped us decipher difficult paleographical questions. Jochen Burgtorf served as a crucial reference for personnel from the military orders and expertly smoothed the way for otherwise hard-to-obtain images and rights acquisitions. Barbara Boehm and Élisabeth Delahaye answered pointed questions about enamels and metalwork at just the right moment, and we thank Richard Leson for facilitating that. Randall Pippenger, Mark Gregory Pegg, Hussein Fancy, and Theodore Evergates graciously answered queries about specific crusaders mentioned here, and we are grateful for their expertise. We also thank S. C. Kaplan, who was on the spot for a last minute reference. Alan Stahl, likewise, took time to meet for a lovely lunch and to educate us on the specifics of the multiple currency forms mentioned in the text. He also allowed us to photograph examples of these coins from the Princeton University Numismatic Collection, which are reproduced in this volume, and for which we are extremely grateful. That experience further reinforced the importance of holding the material in hand to understand concepts like weight, dimensions, and wear over time, which are rarely well captured or described in print. Along the way we have presented parts of this book and the Account-Inventory to many different audiences, and we are grateful for their comments, questions, and enthusiasm. Finally, Xavier Hélary made this book better in countless ways both precise and general. His comments came at the perfect moment, saved us from errors, and made the commentary immeasurably richer. Likewise, William Chester Jordan read the manuscript and offered characteristic and invaluable feedback, making the book and especially the commentary section much stronger. Thank you. Needless to say, any errors that persist are ours alone.

Finally, we are extremely grateful to the three outside readers for the press, both for their vision in imaging with us what such a collaborative volume could be and for their extremely valuable comments, questions, and insights that have made the editions and commentaries far better. Cecilia Gaposchkin had faith in this book and was a consummate advocate of the project. Both Cecilia Gaposchkin and Maureen Miller pioneered the use of the text with their students, and we are grateful for their feedback. Likewise, Mahinder Kingra has been, as always, wonderful to work with in every way. We also thank Karen Hwa for overseeing production of the book and Enid Zafran for preparing the index.

Our families have lived with our interest in Eudes over these years. Eudes has become a household name, and his many and varied things—silk overcoats, linen underwear, personal chapel, beaver testicles, and chessboard, to list a few—have been a touchstone of conversation and the center of not a few inside jokes. We are grateful to Scott, Mirabelle, and Vivienne Bruce for helping us remember what is really compelling about life and its fine and wonderful details; and to Pete and Leo Morreale for tolerating the many hours we spent pouring over an errant point or mysterious minim. And we are thankful for friendship, which is at the heart of so much of this work, both now and during Eudes’s own time. All we can say is l’amour, toujours, l’amour.