This “companion” is designed to introduce a range of materials deemed to constitute the culture (or, perhaps better, cultures) of medieval England, from approximately the Norman Conquest to roughly the Reformation. The fields presented here may offer a rather unusual fit with standard courses and disciplines, but the pressures on modern frameworks are intended. It is not unusual, however, for study of early periods to offer some combination of “literature,” “history,” “archaeology,” “art history,” or other fields. Studies in antiquity and the Renaissance do this regularly, and medieval studies from the outset was defined in an equally capacious framework. Partly this is because times more distant from our world make obvious the need for a more varied set of tools yet more synthetic angle of view. To be sure, the history of scholarship shows that studies in particular disciplines need the context of their own conversations, debates, and long-cultivated tools and strategies. But scholarly history also suggests that work in particular fields flourishes in an environment of other pursuits in the same period. Scholars and students in any one field need the companionship of others pursuing related kinds of work, to broaden perspectives and inspire new ways of carrying out particular endeavors, and to advance our understanding of how issues and materials that we treat separately were in their own period related.