This volume honors the accomplishments, in work and in life, of our mentor, teacher, colleague and friend, Jill Mann. It both celebrates and marks out the extent to which she has achieved pre-eminence in two distinct fields, medieval Latin and Middle English, although even such celebration does not do sufficient justice to her mastery of a wide variety of sub-disciplines within both fields. For Jill is also an editor of the first rank, as well as the kind of textual scholar such editing requires; a close reader of almost unparalleled skill, not least because she is a linguist with an extraordinary command of the ancillary languages to those in which she mainly works (French and Italian, as well as Dutch and German) as well as their medieval forms and grammar and literature; in addition, she is a superb intellectual historian, as at home and incisive in her reading of works of philosophy and literary theory as in her analyses of literary texts. There may be scholars working who have done as much as Jill to heal the breach that has opened wide between attentive criticism of medieval vernacular literature and deep knowledge of its Latin background since Erich Auerbach's Mimesis (1946) and his Literary Language and its Public (1958), but we do not know of any.

What was immediately apparent upon the publication of Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (1973) was not only that Jill's knowledge of Latin and its literature is exhaustive, but also that the quality of understanding that she brings to any text and its range of meanings would, by itself, have placed her among the first rank of critics.