Introduction: Of gentle deeds and generative improvisations

John Watkins, the inspiration for this volume, is a major literary and cultural historian whose work moves effortlessly across geographical, temporal, and political borders, allowing texts and figures of history to haunt later eras and raise new questions. He has played a generative and generous role in developing a historicist methodology and a scholarly community that both place multiple pasts and presents in active dialogue with one another. Early Modern Improvisations: Essays on History and Literature in Honor of John Watkins pays tribute to the far-reaching influence of Watkins on the fields of history and literature and on the people with whom he has come into contact over a career that spans more than 30 years.