This volume celebrates the work of A. C. Spearing, our teacher, colleague, and friend. Tony's influence has been strong in more than one area of medieval literary studies: his foundational The Gawain-Poet: A Critical Study (1970) has not been superseded; his Medieval Dream-Poetry (1976) shaped all subsequent work on dream visions; he is one of the seminal figures in Med/Ren studies because of his Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (1985); and his latest books, on subjectivity and narratology (Textual Subjectivity: The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics, 2005, and Medieval Autographies: The “I” of the Text, 2012), have drawn attention and critical controversy both within medieval studies and beyond, proving to be even more provocative and influential, perhaps, than his initial groundbreaking volume, Criticism and Medieval Poetry. It is hard to overstate the impression this, his first book, made when it came out in 1964. Spearing was immediately termed the first New Critic in Middle English studies (if not in medieval studies generally) and his subsequent studies of the Gawain-poet and Chaucer, which were read widely by audiences from high schools to universities, established him as a humane, subtle, and interesting reader of texts. His influence on formalist readings of medieval literature has been profound and inescapable.

In an unpublished lunchtime talk at his home university, the University of Virginia, in October 2004, just before the publication of Textual Subjectivity, Spearing succinctly laid out his own perception of his scholarship as he spoke of “My First Half-Century as a Medievalist”: “I haven't ceased to be a formalist, in the sense that I haven't ceased to place literary value at the centre of my studies or to believe that what can convincingly be said about literary texts can be related to the details of their verbal form.” The insight that attention to form can and must underlie our interpretations of literary texts remains one of Spearing's greatest contributions to the field of literary criticism of medieval texts.

In the course of preparing this volume, the editors received a transcription of some fragmentary verses. They were sent by a scholar from Cambridge, the apparent site of the story related in this most interesting early poem. The copy we obtained appears to be of very recent vintage, perhaps from the middle part of the twentieth century, around about 1956 or 1957. It has struck us that the story seems to have certain affinities with another brief fragment that by chance has since come into our hands. Examining the verse structure closely, and taking into account prominent dialectical features, we have formed the opinion that these are two sections of the same fourteenth-century poem, previously unrecorded and nowhere accounted for in scholarship on the period. It may be, however, that the second fragment is by a slightly later, somewhat cavalier hand, perhaps even a pupil of the first poet. It seems wholly appropriate that they should appear for the first time together. Having examined both manuscripts carefully, we initially thought that perhaps the letters “ACS” and “c.m.” scribbled in the margins might help in attribution of this poem, even though our original describes the first verses as “apparently by the Gawain-poet.” We have since, however, tentatively conjectured that these letters, even if they are initials, represent scribal activity, perhaps pen tests, possibly of use in determining provenance. It is our hope that the author of these verses, or at least of the earlier ones, should be discovered and properly acclaimed. Given the subject matter of the first fragment, which includes a description of a terrifying beautiful lady uncannily similar to the great scholar, Elizabeth Salter, we surmise that the early verses at least could have been written by a precocious Cambridge student of considerable brilliance – someone witty, and, like the Gawain-poet, a keen and humane observer of human behavior. What better place for them to be published than in this celebration of the scholar who put the work of the Gawain-poet on the map?