This volume is a tribute to Mark Adrian Goldie, from friends and former students, to mark his retirement from the Cambridge History Faculty in September 2019. It is intended to honour both his own scholarly contribution to the field and his role as a teacher and a mentor. Mark's interests have been broad and have grown broader over the course of his career. He is at once an historian of ideas, political historian and historian of religion, while some of his publications have branched into social and cultural history. Although Mark's geographical and chronological focus has been on England under the later Stuarts – the period from the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 to the Hanoverian succession of 1714 – he has also written about Scotland and Ireland, continental Europe and colonial North America, and published pieces that go back to the sixteenth century or push forward into the late eighteenth. On his Cambridge University website, Mark describes his research interests broadly as ‘British intellectual, political, and religious history, c. 1650–c. 1800’, a claim vindicated not only by his own publication record but also by the wide variety of topics his graduate students have pursued. Mark has supervised thirty PhD theses to date. Limitations of space meant that we were unable to ask all Mark's former students to contribute to this volume. We endeavoured, however, to solicit contributions that would reflect the breadth of Mark's scholarly endeavours and also the various generational cohorts he has inspired. Contributors were asked to write pieces that in some way engaged with Mark's work and publications. We hope that what is offered here does justice to the man, his scholarship and his mentorship.

Given the range of Mark's interests, we puzzled over how best to write the introduction to this volume. We could highlight some of Mark's landmark articles, essays, edited volumes and books, but which ones? The four editors all have quite discrete interests and scholarly foci, albeit overlapping to some degree, and we each have our own lists of favourites – and they are long! We decided, instead, that each editor should write his own reflection, albeit with briefs to focus on particular areas so as to lend the introduction overall coverage and coherence.