Professor David Knowles, when still a young Downside monk, published in 1927 a short survey, The English Mystics,which workers in this field have used and quoted and respected as one of the first appraisals to be both popular and scholarly, free alike from prejudice and enthusiasm, of the reputations of some spiritual writers of later mediaeval England. In that same year, Hope Allen produced her vast study, Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle, and since then much else has been accomplished. She assisted in the sensational discovery and the publication of the Book of Margery Kempe; and although most of us have come to deplore her methods, her ebullience and many of her contentions, we who have followed her have all learned and profited much from Hope Allen's tireless devotion to her subject. Professor Arnould's text of Rolle's Melos, Professor Hodgson's critical editions of The Cloud of Unknowing and the allied treatises, Dr Helen Gardner's studies in the text of the Cloud and The Scale of Perfection, and the edition of The Chastising of God's Children in which Miss Joyce Bazire and the present writer collaborated, are all works which could not have begun where they did, had it not been for the pioneering of Miss Allen.