This collection of essays is both a tribute to and a reflection of the career of C.Warren Hollister. The idea for this volume began with a series of four sessions on ‘Henry I and the Anglo-Norman World’ held in honor of the longawaited, and sadly posthumous, publication of Hollister’s biography of the king; the sessions were part of the Thirty-Eighth International Medieval Congress at Western Michigan University in early May, 2003. After the conference, the Haskins Society very kindly expressed interest in publishing papers from the sessions, augmented by other contributions, as a special volume of its Journal. A fine collection of essays in Hollister’s honor, The Normans and their Adversaries at War, had already appeared. As its title indicates, however, that work focuses on one of Hollister’s scholarly interests, military history, and the essays in it were written before Henry I was published. This collection in a sense supplements it, concentrating on other fields where Hollister labored in the work that culminated in Henry I: royal biography, of course, but also political history more generally (including Church-State relations), administrative history, and prosopography.

Although this volume grew out of the sessions at Kalamazoo in 2003, it does not simply print the papers presented there. Only two of the essays, those by Lois Huneycutt and Robert Babcock, are revised versions of papers from that conference. Three other participants in those sessions, Richard Barton, David Crouch, and Stephanie Christelow, chose to substitute essays that they thought more fitting for this collection. Papers by Kathleen Thompson and Ann Williams stem from another meeting, the Haskins Society Day-Conference on ‘Henry I of England’ held at the Institute of Historical Research in London in September of 2002. In addition, several former students of Hollister who had not presented papers at Kalamazoo generously contributed essays: David Spear, Sally Vaughn, Heather Tanner, and RáGena DeAragon. Regardless of their varied origins, all the essays represent work that is in some way dependent on Hollister’s ground-breaking scholarship in Anglo-Norman studies, especially his magnum opus, Henry I.