Original publication: Piana, Marco. “Preface.” Confraternitas 30 (1-2): 2020. 3-5. DOI: 10.33137/confrat.v30i1-2.33684. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Confraternitas. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Confraternitas under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see creativecommons.org/licenses/.