I have been asked, by some much younger than myself, to provide a brief narrative of my personal discovery of William of Malmesbury and of how Michael Winterbottom and I came to collaborate in editing and translating his works. This is not a review of William of Malmesbury scholarship over the last forty years; that is for another to undertake. But, in concentrating on myself and Michael, I do not mean to imply that we two have been solely responsible for the increased interest in, and discoveries about, William in recent years.

The beginning of the story is told in the Introduction to my book William of Malmesbury. My postgraduate work, at Melbourne and Sydney Universities, and my earliest publications, focused on books and learning at the great East Anglian abbey of Bury St Edmunds. In 1973–4, while ‘treading water’ between academic jobs – yes, they were hard to get then too – I began to think of studying an individual person rather than the culture of a religious institution. I envisaged such a person as a Benedictine monk of the twelfth century, a scholar and writer, perhaps a historian, certainly someone learned in the literature and ideas of the Ancient World – in other words, a William of Malmesbury-shaped individual. William was certainly a name to me, but I knew of him only as a historian. Then I found M. R. James's Murray Lecture, Two Ancient English Scholars, in which he discussed the books and authors read by Aldhelm and William, and the possible connections between them. In a few pages James pulls from the pie plums such as William's great collection of Cicero's works, including the passage in which the monk defends his love of pagan literature, and the Polyhistor, which gathers together extracts from this literature, telling of ancient peoples and places, and much more. Here was the man I was looking for. An anxious search for more recent scholarship building on James's revelations revealed mercifully little, with the important exception of Leighton Reynolds's monograph on the medieval tradition of Seneca's letters. Reynolds had shown that Seneca's correspondence circulated in two parts from late antiquity until the early twelfth century, when someone in south-western England, very probably William, united them. What was beyond doubt was that William knew both parts of the tradition – the first writer to do so since antiquity.

On 31 December 1974 Richard Southern wrote to Roger Mynors, after receiving a typescript copy of Mynors's translation of William of Malmesbury's Gesta Regum Anglorum:

What Southern meant by ‘historical vision’ one can only conjecture, but I imagine that he meant history seen as having a pattern and perhaps a purpose, and its recording as reflecting and emphasising those features, possibly with a view to the moral improvement of the reader. William certainly thought all these things, but it is not easy to be confident about describing his thoughts precisely or in detail: he is not often overt about them, and his rare expressions of them are scattered about his works; he could be ambivalent, even contradictory, and he changed his mind over time. Southern was right to use the word ‘complexity’. I shall nonetheless attempt to describe William's ‘vision’ under three heads which seem to me to bring into focus what was most important for him: God, Empire, and the kingdom or nation of England. Hopefully, I will not be thought to be merely ‘yoking disparate ideas by violence together’.

God

As one would expect, William wrote providential history of a kind. It is in the main conventionally orthodox, with one exception: it is noticeably not apocalyptic. God intervenes in and regulates the course of history, but there is no mention of the Last Days or Last Judgement in William's historical writings, or of the Seven Ages (all of these do feature in his Commentary on Lamentations), no sense of history moving towards a denouement or even that the dark days of William's time – which he thought darker as he grew older – might herald the Last Judgement.

Around the turn of 2013–14 Rodney Thomson began to think about a conference with William of Malmesbury as its theme. He did so for at least three reasons: firstly, there had never been a conference devoted solely to William, and the time seemed ripe for one; secondly, Michael Winterbottom would turn 80 on 21 September 2014, and a conference seemed an appropriate way of honouring his long and fundamental service to William studies; and finally, Rodney and Michael had in hand a new edition and translation of William's Miracles of the Virgin; its completion would mean that all of William's original works were now available in critical editions with accompanying translation. Publication was scheduled for the middle of 2015, and it seemed possible that it could be made to coincide with an appropriate date for a conference – in the event it appeared a little later.

Because Rodney Thomson and Michael Winterbottom were both long retired, their access to funding and other forms of institutional support was limited. RMT therefore contacted the Medieval Chronicle Society early in 2014, who quickly put him in touch with Ilya Afanasyev, then a graduate student at Hertford College, Oxford. Ilya had been responsible for organising a conference of the Society held in Oxford in 2012, in which Rodney Thomson had played a marginal role. Ilya was willing to put together a team, and the conference began to take shape. From the ground in Oxford, Ilya, Emily Dolmans and Emily Winkler organised and managed the programme on the theme of ‘William of Malmesbury and his Legacy’, held on 3–5 July 2015. What the conference revealed is that the true extent of William's legacy is still beyond our grasp. There is much more to learn, and to discover.

The conference was an impetus for the volume, but this book is also an endeavour in its own right. It includes papers not delivered at the conference, and covers a wider range of material. It does not purport to represent the full range of scholarship on William of Malmesbury, but rather to show that such efforts are very much alive. It is our express hope that the volume will be as inspiring to others as the conference and papers were to us.