THE COMPLEXITYOF the medieval world is often obscured by the tendency of many modern scholars to focus on specific areas of research, only occasionally stepping outside the boundaries of their chosen discipline. Despite teaching across the period, Old English critics rarely look forward to later texts, Middle English scholars generally look back only so far and, often, neither looks to continental traditions unless they are searching for sources. But medieval textual traditions were not so isolated, and even though Old English changed over time, giving way to Middle English in its various dialects, they developed into new forms of writing and expression that reflected different social concerns and tastes which crossed geographical and chronological boundaries. One of the strongest cross-cultural currents was that between England and the Low Countries, which exchanged people, ideas, textiles, and were often allied against larger enemies. Both English and Middle Dutch textual traditions owe a great debt to the corpus of medieval French literature, often working from the same (or similar) sources; but they also adapted ideas, motifs, and tropes to suit their own audiences and occasionally shared their literary endeavors between them. Unfortunately, scholarship on these cross-cultural exchanges is not always accessible, especially if it is written in modern Dutch. As Geert Claassens explains, ‘In short, the language barrier that exists … prevents many foreign scholars from becoming acquainted with a broad corpus of texts that in the Middle Ages formed part of a much more homogenous European literary culture’. Few scholars have contributed as much to this wider view of medieval England and its cultural contacts across the channel than David F. Johnson. His work traces the textual traditions of Old English, especially in manuscript production, through later medieval romances in both England and the Low Countries, highlighting the connections between texts, motifs, and themes. This volume takes the work of Johnson as its starting point, investigating the intricacies of early English manuscript production and preservation, illuminating the variations in reinterpreting Old English poetry, particularly Beowulf, and tracking those complexities through later Arthurian English and Middle Dutch romances and drama.