Acknowledgments

The starting point for this project was the conference "Religion and Educational Media", organised by the International Society for Research on Textbooks and Educational Media e.V. (IGSBi) in 2017 in Augsburg, and in particular the workshop "Learning to Read with Catechetical Texts – Historical Approaches", an activity of IGSBi's Reading Primers Special Interest Group. The workshop underlined potentials for a broader and a more systematic transnational analysis of catechism primers, and one year later, at the occasion of an IGSBi conference in Brixen/Bressanone, the editors of this volume organised a panel with the theme “The Catechism Primer: a Transnational, Pluri-Confessional and Multilingual Educational Medium”. We wish to thank the board of IGSBi (Eva Matthes, Augsburg; Vitaly Bezrogov, Moscow; and Sylvia Schütze, Bielefeld) for providing these wonderful opportunities and the participants of both events for helpful ideas to go forward with the plan of this volume.

From the Brixen/Bressanone conference, the book quickly gained momentum, but it would not have been published without many helping hands. First, we want to thank the editors of the Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition series at John Benjamins, as well as our peer reviewers. They have shown both interest and expertise in the history of catechism primers, which has brought us valuable suggestions enabling us to improve the book.

Johari Murray has given support in some linguistic revisions to the texts and the glossary. Niki Sioki from the University of Nicosia has checked and commented on the glossary in different phases of the work. Thank-you for your respected help!

One of the great strengths of this volume is the diversity of contributors. The editors are of course immensely grateful to all of those who offered essays for the volume, all of whom have shared their expertise for the common good. One in particular, Charlotte Appel, also connected us with new contributors, as well as giving us valuable suggestions for the glossary, for all of which we are grateful.