This volume has its origins in a symposium honouring Professor Jane Hawkes’ contribution to early medieval studies, acknowledging her research and celebrating the scholarly legacy she has created through her teaching practice and her pedagogical relationships with (and mentoring of) emerging and early-career scholars, several of whom went on to contribute to this volume in its published form. This is, in some ways, an unconventional tribute. Jane, however, is a fairly unconventional figure (wonderfully so), and we are sure she will forgive the liberties taken by the emerging and early-career scholars who are brought together here to mark her engagement with the field and celebrate her achievements.

Jane's career and academic output have been particularly noteworthy and wide-ranging, addressing Old English literature, archaeology, iconography, stone sculpture, exegesis, the institutional, cultural, and material identities of Rome and stone, cultural transfer between East and West, eschatology, the role of imagery in the medieval period and subsequent medievalisms, and materiality and modes of viewing, as well as the iconography-based art history for which she is perhaps best known. She has devoted her scholarly career to the study of Anglo-Saxon stone, exploring its iconographies, symbolic significances and scholarly contexts in depth and detail, shedding light on the obscure and understudied sculpted stone monuments of early medieval England for members of the academy and public alike. This lithic corpus, initially addressed through antiquarian studies and archaeological approaches, remains somewhat under-represented in art-historical scholarship even today, but the fact that it is studied in these terms at all owes much to Jane, who was one of the first scholars to address these monuments and sculpted fragments from an interdisciplinary, art-historical, and predominantly iconographical standpoint. This art-historical emphasis changed the way these objects were viewed and understood by students, peers, and scholars – and her work revolutionised the study of Anglo-Saxon stone. Indeed, from her doctoral thesis on ‘The Non-Crucifixion Iconography of the Pre-Viking Sculpture of the North of England’, funded by the British Academy and awarded by Newcastle University in 1989, to her more recent publications on the relationships between icons and Anglo-Saxon sculpture – such as her 2013 piece ‘Stones of the North: Sculpture in Northumbria in the “Age of Bede”’ – her research has remained at the very forefront of Anglo-Saxon Studies.