The archive is rich. I knew it, of course, having collaborated for nearly twenty years with the founding editor of Studies in Medievalism, Leslie J. Workman, as, in his preferred appellation, “Associate Editor and wife, not necessarily in that order”: if there was any strain on our domestic circumstances, it was that as an inveterate historian he would throw nothing away. But sorting again through the thirty-odd banker's boxes now in the attic of the humanities building at Hope College, where I teach and where Leslie stalked the halls from our marriage in 1983 until the illness that ended his life in 2001, I am again convinced that there is a story worth telling here, and I am grateful that he preserved its documents. How does a discipline get established? What were the origins of Leslie's concept of “medievalism,” and what did he mean by the word? How did his passion for the subject arise from his own education, his anomalous professional identity, his chronically precarious standing in the American academic world? This memoir – postponed until the interval between semesters and composed appropriately in the kind of frantic deadline-haste that always marked our work together (perhaps less work than collusion, I sometimes felt, but that was the fun of it) – makes a few preliminary stabs at answering those questions.