In this essay I look at a group of texts written in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, which were initially circulated in manuscript as contributions to the ‘Lollard’ debates about church wealth and clerical morality in that period. They were then printed in the early 1530s (and reprinted in the 1560s and 1570s) as contributions to similar debates a century and more later than their origin. These texts, Lollard writing re-presented for Reformation reading, offer an interesting case study of chronological and epistemological distortion, as they might be argued to distort conceptions of time and history around them both ‘positively’ and ‘negatively’ – if those terms have any meaning – but always powerfully and provocatively. The texts present challenges to our definitions of how they might be categorised, what they might suggest about the communities that produced and received them, and what they imply about our own sense of their relationship to time and the creation of historical narrative.

Late medieval works printed in the Tudor period have generally been read, explicitly or implicitly, in terms of the posthumous or the undead, as examples of the ‘afterlives’ of medieval writings. But I want to consider them here not only as revenants, things not quite dying, but also as things not quite new-born, as contributions to the work in progress of the never entirely achieved project of English religious Reformation. So, in so far as they might be distortions of late-medieval authorial intentions, disinterred and reanimated by Tudor printers, they are also elements of a new reformed typology of protest, fresh texts offered to new readers as part of a campaign to free hearts and minds allegedly long-manacled by the old lies of catholic deception. As we shall see, both their novelty and their antiquity were central to their presentation and reception.

To begin very simply: these texts certainly distort modern readers’ perceptions of the terms of debate in the early exchanges of Henry VIII's Reformation, with polemical claim and counter-claim clouding any clear sense of the facts at issue. Just how much wealth did the Tudor Church possess?

The contributions in this volume of Essays and Studies were inspired by the Stanford Text Technologies Collegium on ‘Distortion’, held in May 2015 at Stanford University. Funded by the Denning Gift, this three-day intensive collegium examined one of the key themes in the history of textual communication: how texts are distorted even as they are disseminated, sometimes as a result of accidental manipulation, or careful mediation; sometimes through wilful perversion or falsification. At the Stanford Collegium, we were delighted to host Benjamin Albritton, Mark Algee-Hewitt, Emma Cayley, Paul Fyfe, Tom O'Donnell, Sarah Ogilvie, Timothy Powell, Colin Reeves-Fortney, Giovanni Scorcioni, Elizabeth Tyler and Greg Walker, and each gave powerful and intellectually stimulating papers on very different topics, centred on the concept and practice of distortion.

We are grateful to be able to include the work of some of these original participants in this book, and other essays we have specifically commissioned for inclusion here. We are pleased to thank the attentive and engaged audience at the Collegium, whose informed questions and focused responses allowed invigorated discussion. We also wish to thank the Dean of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford; the Denning Fund for Humanities and Technology, which supports Text Technologies; the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), which hosted the Collegium; and Daeyeong Kim, who, as Text Technologies Graduate Administrator, organised the proceedings with great skill and professionalism.

Volume 38 enshrines the second part of the Festschrift presented to John McGavin at the METh meeting at Southampton in 2015. A stimulating and varied collection of papers, it again celebrates the breadth and influence of John's interests — and naturally, with a Scottish bent.

The first two papers, by Alice Hunt and Eila Williamson, show how a coronation (of James I and VI) and a funeral (of ‘bold Buccleuch’) spoke to their audiences through ceremonial and its carefully devised trappings. The scene then shifts to Wales: Sue Niebrzydowski describes a Welsh play of Troelus a Chresyd which drew its plot from both Chaucer and Henryson, while David Klausner attempts to disentangle the events behind the reportage of what was possibly an early monastic Crucifixion play. A group of essays addresses audience and spectatorship. Elisabeth Dutton juxtaposes an Annunciation by Fra Lippo Lippi with a seemingly incongruous partner, the St John's College 1602 student play of Narcissus showcased at the Southampton METh meeting, to consider the nature of spectatorship and self-realisation both inside and outside a work of art. Charlotte Steenbrugge convincingly challenges the too-easy assumption that the modes of audience address in morality plays must be the same as those of sermons. Nadia van Pelt calls on cognitive science to assess how new theories can contribute to our analysis of multiple spectator reactions. Mishtooni Bose explores ‘the drama of performed thought’ in didactic dialogue-plays, in which an apparent impasse can enable a leap of thought which opens up new ground. Pamela M. King offers a reconstruction of the soundscape, intentional and peripheral, of the York Corpus Christi Play. Clare Egan tackles an unexpected form of performance, the publication of libels, using the rich but underexplored resource of reports of Star Chamber cases from Devon. Finally, we are honoured to be able to present David Mills’ last article, intended for the Festschrift and dictated to Joy Mills, on the Abraham Sacrifiant of Theodore Bèze.