It was in the mid-1980s. The normally calm and immaculate University Registrar arrived for our meeting, dishevelled and abstracted. ‘I’ve just been academically mugged by one of your research students in a session with postgraduates’, he said. ‘She was in the right of course – but I have to say that is an impressive and determined person!’

The postgraduate, of course, was Jane. She had arrived in Newcastle in the late 1970s with none of the qualifications needed for university entry. Displaying all that determination and academic acuity that was later to impress the Registrar, within a year she had acquired the relevant certificates at a local college and promptly enrolled in the most demanding course our Faculty then offered – English Language and Literature. Three years later she emerged with a first-class degree – somethin g which in those far-off days we awarded only with grudging reluctance.

To my delight, she then agreed to undertake a PhD study on aspects of Anglo-Saxon sculptural iconography. I knew this to be a field ripe for exploration. Apart from the crosses at Bewcastle and Ruthwell, earlier scholars had largely ignored the subject – thus a glance through Gertrude Schiller's multi-volume Iconography of Christian Art (which was one of our major reference books in the 1960s and 1970s) reveals hardly a single image of pre-Norman English sculpture, despite the fact that many of her arguments would have been immeasurably strengthened by their inclusion. It was as if the entire corpus did not exist.

This was, however, a subject which demanded a range of skills and an understanding of varying disciplines: visual awareness, an engagement with both Old English and Latin, familiarity with liturgical and patristic sources. With determination – that word again! – Jane set about acquiring these tools, and the resulting doctoral study was a magisterial achievement. Since then, of course, she has established herself as a major figure in the field, publishing insights into early medieval iconography of which my generation had been totally unaware: of how the figural art of the Sandbach crosses closed gaps in the seeming discontinuities in European art between the late antique world and the art of the Ottonian empire; of how the Wirksworth Annunciation scene hinted at the presence in England of a model type known briefly in Eastern art in the sixth century (with all that this implies about Mercian cultural roots);