Acknowledgements
The idea for this volume came about in January 2021, when Simon Gaunt was planning his retirement after more than thirty years as a professor of medieval French and Occitan studies. At that point, we intended the project to be a celebration of his extraordinary career and his generosity as a mentor. Following Simon’s untimely death in December of that same year, the collection took on another, commemorative purpose. When we met with contributors to workshop essays for the volume in July 2022 at King’s College London, the institution where Simon had been a professor since 1998, we were all feeling his absence as a friend, mentor, collaborator, and intellectual inspiration. The work that we did during that gathering was emotionally as well as intellectually demanding. We are grateful for the collegiality and supportiveness that contributors showed to us and to one another, both during the workshop itself and in their subsequent work on their essays. We would firstly, then, like to thank all of the authors whose chapters feature in this book: Philippe Frieden, Jane Gilbert, Miranda Griffin, Alice Hazard, Thomas Hinton, Melek Karataş, Sarah Kay, Matthew Siôn Lampitt, Catherine Léglu, Peggy McCracken, Robert Mills, David Murray, Karen Pratt, Henry Ravenhall, and Simone Ventura. Without their commitment to the difficult labour that this project involved, there would be no volume.
We want to thank King’s College London for hosting the workshop and especially Alice Hazard, who did much of the organizational work. Thanks are due, too, to Sarah Kay, who provided invaluable advice on the conceptualization of the collection at the outset, and who, along with Peggy McCracken, graciously commented on a draft of our introduction. We are grateful to both Linda Paterson, who produced a bibliography of Simon’s publications, and to Bill Burgwinkle, who crafted the afterword.
We are indebted to Marcella Mulder and the editorial board at Brill, who have supported and advised us from the project’s inception. We also wish to thank the two anonymous readers for their constructive feedback, which helped us to strengthen the book in its final stages.
Even as we dedicate this book to Simon’s memory, our original purpose remains unchanged. This volume celebrates Simon Gaunt’s abundant scholarly contribution as an author, collaborator, and mentor. It has been profoundly shaped by the intellectual community that he laboured to create. In demonstrating the enduring richness of Simon’s scholarship, we hope to have shown how that work continues to inspire those working in French and Occitan studies, as well as opening new pathways for those who have yet to embark on their journeys.
For helping us to bring this work to as wide an audience as possible through open access publication, we thank Patrick ffrench, the U.K. Society for French Studies, and King’s College London.
Emma Campbell and Luke Sunderland
August 2025