Tim Reuter had been planning to publish a collection of his papers with Cambridge University Press, but died, on 14 October 2002, before he could complete it. The material included is almost entirely as Tim planned it. Only one paper (on the recent historiography of medieval political ritual) has been impossible to retrieve, and perhaps was never written. In its place, an unpublished paper on medieval ethnicity has been included. Of the twenty-two papers, eleven are reprinted here as originally published (they have been scanned, and a few minor additions and corrections put in). Seven (and these include the longest) have been translated from Tim's German. Four have been edited from Tim's unpublished texts. More than half of the book, therefore, consists of work hitherto unavailable to an English-speaking readership. Where additional material has been added to the notes, or notes supplied, this has been made clear by the use of square brackets. Tim intended to add a section of ‘Addenda, corrigenda and responses to criticism’, and that has proved impossible to reconstruct. Otherwise, the present volume is as near as possible to what he intended.

In preparing Tim's work for the Press, I have incurred some debts of gratitude. First and foremost, I owe Tim's widow Georgina Reuter warm thanks for her friendship and support throughout the project, and for much practical help in retrieving material from Tim's computer.