P.J.C. Field, Professor of English at the University of Wales (Bangor), is a distinguished Arthurian scholar and Vice-President of the International Arthurian Society. Although he is an expert in medieval literature in general, much of his scholarly life has been devoted to Malory's Le Morte Darthur. Many of his most important articles have been reprinted in Malory: Texts and Sources (1998). Among many articles and other contributions to Malory studies, three works may be singled out. His Romance and Chronicle: A Study of Sir Thomas Malory's Prose Style (1971) was the first comprehensive analysis of the features of Malory's distinctive style. In The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory (1993), Professor Field uses several previously unexamined documents to probe Malory's personal, social, and political contexts. He offered a new identification of Malory himself; it attracted considerable attention, described in the Literary Review as ‘a tour de force of scholarship and detective work. … So good it sets the mind racing’. Finally, his 1990 revised version of Eugène Vinaver's The Works of Malory is a prelude to the comprehensive new edition of Malory that he is now preparing.

It is with pleasure that the contributors of the twenty-eight essays in this volume seek to mark Professor Field's contribution to Arthurian scholarship in particular – but beyond this we (along with the signatories of the tabula gratulatoria) wish to honour him as a learned and generous scholar who has been a reliable and kind guide to neophyte and expert alike.

Even the Los Alamos physicists brave enough to establish The Prediction Company admit that futurology is still notoriously unreliable as a guide to science. Scholars peering into the future state of play in fields of humanist study carefully resist predictive certitude, not only because we relish the unpredictable but also because we value the idiosyncratic over the replicable result. But since I have been asked to imagine what is next for Arthurian studies, I will temporarily cast my lot with Merlin. First I will briefly look backward as I glance at the quondam of our field as an emerging discipline and then, a bit less cursorily, look forward to some possible directions of study. In this volume Norris Lacy has already mapped the present status of our studies along with his assessment of our prospects; in general, my conclusions are less autumnal than his. In my view, Arthurian Studies have never been healthier or more vibrant than they are at present.

I. QUONDAM

By the time that they formed the Arthurian Society in late 1927, Arthurian scholars at Oxford had determined that this subject was more than a mere sub- niche of literary studies. A few years earlier, on the other side of the pond, that same academic generation (propelled by concerns that studies of medieval Latin literature not be slighted by attention to vernacular languages) founded the Medieval Academy of America. Each of these enterprises had at least two aims: first, to foster research and teaching of medieval subjects, and second, to further public discussion of the results of such research. John Nicholas Brown - philanthropist and long-time treasurer of the Medieval Academy - once told me that the founders of the Medieval Academy hoped that knowledge of the medieval past might aid crucial efforts to sustain international cooperation and peace in the period following World War I. One suspects a parallel internation- alist concern among Arthurians.

The Oxford-centered Arthurian Society - slightly more than half of whose members, it is interesting to note, were women - sponsored a scholarly journal and named it Arthuriana. The society’s organizer and honorary president was Euge’ne Vinaver. Soon, perhaps in imitation of the Harvard-centered Medieval Academy, the Arthurian Society amplified its focus and membership. By 1931, it changed its name to the Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, and its journal was transformed into Medium JEvum.