Fellows during my years as associate director have been unfailingly helpful to me in ways too numerous and varied to list here. The Board of Trustees helped facilitate my work by granting time away from the Center so that I could devote time to research and writing. Center directors Phil Converse and Neil Smelser both warmly supported my pursuit of this project and oªered extensive, thoughtful reactions to earlier drafts of the manuscript.

I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Douglas McAdam, a former Fellow of the Center and now its director. From the moment he learned about my interest in Gothic cathedrals, Doug conveyed to me his abiding belief in the value of this somewhat unorthodox project. I have especially appreciated his insistent instruction to pay no heed to critics whose skepticism is rooted in narrow, discipline-based concerns over ownership and control of intellectual turf.

Then there are my colleagues on the Center staª. From the start, our assistant director, Nancy Pinkerton, embraced this project and the Sarum Seminar that grew out of it (more about the seminar in a moment) with the same spirit of enthusiasm, joy, energy, and ebullient playfulness that she brings to everything, and I thank her deeply for all that she has done. Leslie Lindzey and Lisa Staton helped prepare successive drafts of this manuscript and devised clever schemes to protect occasional blocks of writing time while I was carrying out my duties as associate director. Jesse Lewis worked his photocopying magic to prepare the illustrations, charts, and graphs. Kathleen Much helped make the manuscript more readable. Finally, Cynthia Moore, Jean Michel, Steve Forte, and Emma Raub were extremely helpful to me in locating books and journal articles, often with only the flimsiest of clues about imagined titles or forgotten authors.

Before beginning this project, I had not realized how many people share an interest in cathedrals. Through conversations with them, talks and seminar presentations I have given, and gatherings I have attended with them, I have been drawn into an extremely interesting circle of people from varied walks of life, people whom I might

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