IN SEEKING TO honour Paul E. Szarmach's commitment to medieval studies—and his role as co-editor of Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History (SMRH)—we organized a series of three panels at the 57th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in 2022. The call for papers drew scholars from around the world, and the panels were bursting at the seams. Fifteen papers of exceptional quality were presented. We cheered as we raised a glass in Paul's memory, celebrating his contributions in Kalamazoo and more. As was true with the Congress panels, there was significant interest in developing these papers for a special issue of SMRH, and contributions numbered more than one volume could sustain. Volume 17, published in 2023, features nine articles on late medieval literature, history, and culture, as well as studies of medievalism. A few were accepted for publication before Paul's death, but the majority were cultivated to honour his legacy, as are the contributions that constitute Volume 18. The following, which are offered by long-time colleagues and former students, are focused on early medieval England and beyond, a tribute to Paul's engagement with early saints’ lives, Anglo-Latin and Carolingian manuscript production, and the reception of early literature and history.

Volume 18, which will conclude Joel Rosenthal's stint as editor of SMRH, will fittingly close the chapter on his long-time collaboration with Paul, but we would be remiss not to indicate how Paul has (posthumously) fostered yet another collaboration that has resulted in the publication of excellent scholarship. Paul loved to bring people together and to publish their smart ideas. In taking up the editing of these volumes, we have enjoyed rich conversations with the various contributors and know readers will find much here to provoke further scholarly engagement. We are grateful to acknowledge too the many rewards we have discovered during our partnership as editors. Paul is the lodestar that framed this work, and we are all enriched by the results.

Nota bene: SMRH vol. 17 and subsequent volumes are now published by Arc Humanities Press. After this volume, the journal will be titled Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Sources. To continue or start a subscription, please contact the Journals Manager Rob Edwards at rob.edwards@arc-humanities.org.

WHEN THE MEDIEVAL Academy of America met in Boston in 2016, Bob Bjork from Arizona State's Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies said that Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, which they had published for some years, was in need of a new editor. Independently, Paul Szarmach and Joel Rosenthal indicated an interest in taking this on. Then they discovered their mutual interest and, since they were old friends who had co-edited a number of projects and as a team had run an international conference, they offered to be joint or co-editors. This was an easy pairing, as Paul's special interest was Old English literature and he also had a broad knowledge, from a career of editing and administering, of a vast range of medieval topics. And Joel, though primarily a social historian of the later Middle Ages, had also worked a bit on Anglo-Saxon and early medieval history.

Together they co-edited four volumes of the series (Volume 16 is forthcoming). But before they could really turn to Volume 17, which would have been their last, Paul died. This made a memorial volume of the series, both a professional and a serious personal obligation. As Joel needed a co-editor—especially since he wanted to solicit contributions from Paul's primary area of expertise—he turned to Virginia Blanton. She is Curators’ Distinguished Professor in the Department of English, University of Missouri, Kansas City. Paul had been her doctoral supervisor at SUNY Binghamton. She and Helene Scheck had co-edited (Inter)Texts: Studies in Early Anglo-Saxon Culture Presented to Paul E. Szarmach, and she knew both Paul's field of concentration and many of the scholars with whom he had had so much contact and influence.

Our invitation to publish this volume with memorial tributes to Paul Szarmach from colleagues, students, and old friends met with so much interest, it became necessary to divide the essays into two volumes. Vol. 17 includes several essays that had been submitted and accepted while Paul still was able to read and approve them, as well as five others in his memory. Vol. 18, which will conclude Joel's stint as editor of SMRH, will fittingly close the chapter on his long-time collaboration with Paul.

Unfortunately, Bishop Merke of Carlisle was all too prophetic when he denounced the deposition of Richard II and the accession of Henry IV in 1399. His bold and ringing denunciation, as shaped by Shakespeare in Richard II, is perhaps not too far from what he actually said in his bitter view of both what was taking place and its probable consequences:

That Merke was prophetic is not of issue here, as our writ ends long before the woes he envisioned. Rather, in looking at the deposition of Richard of Bordeaux in 1399, our concern is with the stance taken and the roles played by the bishops of the seventeen English and the four Welsh sees. And within the episcopate, the stance of that ring of courtier bishops who had been so close to the king and who owed their appointments to this special relationship is our real point of focus. From the perspective of on-stage drama, it would be quite satisfying to posit the head-on confrontation of the two parties, one led by Thomas Merke for the Ricardians and the other by Thomas Arundel for Henry Bolingbroke and the Lancastrians, with some poetic license by our later-day playwright helping bring matters to a head. This narrow interpretation or perspective allows us to offer the about-to-be restored Archbishop Arundel as the brains behind Henry's evolving views of his claims and ambitions and that this scenario is too simple is not one we will be called upon to unravel.

A little reflection about Richard's bishops in a collective sense before we turn to a more individualised treatment. As indicated, our special attention will be on those courtier bishops who had risen to the episcopate through intimate friendship with the king. These were – or might well have been – those ‘fair weather friends’ of our title and of our investigation into the role – or the lack thereof – that they, other than Merke, played when Richard's crown toppled and fell.

This essay draws on Proof of Age hearings that were conducted by a local jury of twelve men as part of royal Inquisitions Post Mortem to establish that an heiress or an heir had reached the age of majority and could now claim her or his estate. The oral testimony of the jurors consists largely of memories that indicate how and why the critical day of the heir's birth or baptism – many years earlier – sticks in their minds. These all-male juries offer a large number of very terse (or compressed) testimonies – hundreds and hundreds of “memories” providing us with an array of mnemonic tales, mostly in the form of one-line recollections. What light do these memories shed on the jurors’ world, mixing recollections of the mundane with the picturesque, the highly personal with the disinterested or what was learned at second or third hand? I argue here that even if many of the memories offered are formulaic, in some instances perhaps the mere recitation of a standardized, boiler-plate recollection, they are nevertheless of great interest because of what memories and what kinds of memories – whether genuine or not – have been selected. As Brian Stock reminds us, “the single great storehouse of meaning is memory,” and there was a vast array of memories and false memories from which to pick and choose. Here we are dealing with “social memory” – memory articulated in public before one's peers, by men participating in a formal act of inquiry.

This essay focuses on several specific categories of testimony, of memory, that have been selected from the wide assemblage of jurors’ testimonies because they complement two themes characteristic of Mary Erler's scholarship. One is that of literacy, written records, and books. The other is more diverse: memories that reflect the laity's interest in, knowledge of, and involvement in matters of the church; that is, with the church as the guardian of a belief system and as an institution overseeing and touching upon much of daily life. Memories of this latter sort rest on the proposition that the lives of the laity were closely interwoven with the rituals, structure, and personnel of the church and, furthermore, that the laity were aware of and knowledgeable about such issues.