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.

THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE confirms a suspected provenance for MS Cotton Tiberius E. i and suggests a rationale for its production and use, even as it contributes to scholarship about Anglo-Latin hagiography, monastic history, devotional reading, and the afterlives of medieval manuscripts. I wish to acknowledge here a substantial debt to my mentor and fiercest champion, Paul E. Szarmach, who long ago put before me a Cottonian manuscript containing insular saints—and in doing so changed the pole star by which I have charted my academic career. His last “ask” was for a contribution to this issue of Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, and while I can never repay him for all he has done, this is a small credit in the account ledger. It is, perhaps, a particularly apropos essay for this memorial volume, as it focuses on an astute and canny administrator and his patronage of a book of prose saints’ lives.

In 1696, William Nicolson, Bishop of Carlisle, printed a manuscript donor inscription that specified Abbot Thomas de la Mare of St. Albans (ca. 1309–1396, abbot 1349–1396) gifted the book to a dependency, Redbourn Priory. From that point forward, the collection of saints’ lives in London, British Library Cotton MS Tiberius E. i, has been assigned to Redbourn, even as the book's association with Abbot Thomas has been endorsed, despite the inscription being lost when the book was damaged in the 1731 Asburnham House fire. Remnants of the book vary from complete leaves with slightly burned edges to brittle fragments. During conservation, each of the relatively intact folios, which shrank and buckled in the heat of the fire, was spliced to allow it to lie flat. Now inlaid on paper mounts and bound in two volumes, these leaves (with a text block of 265 x 175 mm) can again be read, albeit with lacunae. A contemporary index at the opening of the first volume (I.2r–5v) is compromised, but the legibility of the surviving leaves makes it possible to ascertain that the two volumes contain John of Tynemouth's Sanctilogium Angliae, Walliae, Scotiae, et Hiberniae, a compendium of insular saints in calendar order by feast beginning with 5 January (I.6r–13r), the feast of Edward the Confessor, and running through to 30 December, the feast of Egwin. Folio 6r (Figure 6.1) opens the collection and is uniquely ornamented by a large, eight-line puzzle initial and a foliate penwork border.

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.

IN RECONSTRUCTING THE lost libraries of Anglo-Saxon England, Michael Lapidge relies on three means by which he establishes the imagined contents of what were once significant collections: inventories of books, extant manuscripts, and citations within authors’ works. He draws on ninth-, tenth-, and eleventh-century inventories; extant manuscripts dating from as early as the mid-eighth century; and citations of what he calls the principal writers, including Aldhelm, Bede, Alcuin, Wulfstan, and Ælfric. As a result, Lapidge's methodology illustrates that we can have some confidence about the general shape of monastic libraries in the later Anglo-Saxon period. We are faced with a number of problems, however, when trying to identify those that existed in the seventh and eighth centuries. There are no inventories from this period and few manuscripts of the type Lapidge defines as library material: that is, those “books acquired and arranged for the purposes of study and the pursuit of knowledge.” It is only because Bede was such a prolific writer and because his works were eagerly copied and used by Continental missionaries that his oeuvre is well-documented, and the library at his community of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow can be broadly sketched. It is a harder task to do so for Alcuin's library at York but there is some indication, based on the books he cites in his letters and in two works, De laude Dei and Versus de patribus, regibus et sanctis Euboricensis ecclesiae, and on the work he effected in the Carolingian school at Aachen. Little, however, is known about the books available to Aldhelm, whose library at Malmesbury is assessed almost entirely by his citations of others. Lapidge's conclusions are compelling, especially about the range of pre-Christian and Christian materials circulating in Anglo-Saxon England, but we are limited by the reception of textual materials when determining the types of library books available.

Simultaneous in date to Lapidge's investigation of Anglo-Saxon libraries and similar in approach is Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr.'s study of the transfer of knowledge as part of the Anglo-Saxon missions. In focusing on the Christian missions in Germania, Bremmer enhances Lapidge's discussion of library books by also considering liturgical and other devotional materials. Bremmer's study focuses on fragmentary manuscript survivals at Werden (before 809) and a book list of a clericus who had likely studied at the minster school in Utrecht (ca. 828).