The origins of this book lie in a day conference held under the auspices of the Wessex Centre for History & Archaeology at the University of Winchester in September 2014. That conference, held in honour of Professor Barbara Yorke following her retirement from the University, was entitled Saints, Rulers and Landscapes in Early Medieval Wessex, and featured papers from a small number of both established and emerging scholars. Those papers were always intended to form a âcoreâ for this Festschrift to our Doktormutter and a number of the papers presented at that conference have been developed for this book. It is testament to the patience and goodwill of those speakers who came to Winchester back in 2014 that this volume was given time to grow, as more scholars responded to the invitation to write pieces suitable for Barbara. We are immensely grateful to all the authors in this volume for their forebearance, good humour and patience, and frequent willingness to respond to comments and queries. Of course, providing comments to the authors would not have been possible without the hard work of various anonymous readers at different stages of this projectâtheir contributions remain uncredited but they have our grateful thanks all the same. Thanks go also to Mark Allen, Katherine Barker, Carey Fleiner, Patrick Hase, David Hinton, Tom James, Simon Keynes, Janine Lavelle, Libby Langlands, Mandy Richardson, and Robert Yorke. We are also grateful to Nicola King for indexing the volume and providing some invaluable comments in the process, as well as to the series editor Bonnie Effros, and our various editors at Brill, Marcella Mulder, Elisa Perotti, Irini Argirouli, Alessandra Giliberto, and Ester Lels. We wish to extend our gratitude to the University of Winchester, which provided generous financial support for the Open Access publication of this volume, as well asâthrough the Wessex Centre for History & Archaeologyâfor the 2014 conference. Finally, our thanks also go to Alison Merry, who kindly painted the wonderful tribute to Barbara used in this volume in her own inimitable style. Alison has been patiently waiting to present the painting to Barbara for the past five years. We hope that the volume does justice to Alisonâs work ⦠and of course, does justice to Barbaraâs scholarship.
Alex Langlands
Ryan Lavelle