When Christian authors issued calls to arms to fight in the Crusades, they habitually turned to Old Testament figures for inspiration. The Maccabees became veritable avatars for this project: the New Knights of the Crusades were dubbed New Maccabees, in the hope that they too would ‘triumph over the wildness of peoples that did not invoke [God’s] name’. This ubiquitous textual analogue performed powerful ideological work: it forged an analogy between Temple and Church in order to exclude infidel Muslim beliefs, practices, and religious spaces. More importantly, it provided a powerful vehicle for re-framing the Crusader struggle to liberate Jerusalem from Saracen forces as the ‘reclaiming’ of their rightful homeland, rather than as a new conquest waged in a foreign land. Although the Fathers of the Church (especially Ambrose, Augustine, and Isidore) had accepted the need for defensive war, they found it more challenging to justify offensive measures according to the inherited apostolic paradigms of pacifism. The appropriation of the Maccabean story allowed authors to recast what was nominally an offensive war overseas as a defensive Holy War for the Promised Land according to authorized Old Testament and Deuterocanonical models. The Maccabees were better suited for this project than were the great kings and leaders of the Old Testament proper, since the first two books of Maccabees were composed after the closing of the Old Testament canon by authors living in the diaspora. Its heroes represented an extension of God's divine plan beyond the classical period of covenant, and therefore provided a direct model for Christians who believed themselves to be the newly Chosen People.

This Crusader focus on the Maccabean warriors marked a new development in Christian exegesis on the books of Maccabees. Before the ninth century, Christian authors wrote almost exclusively about the Maccabean martyrs as prototypes for Christian saints. The Maccabean martyrs were, in fact, the only such ‘Old Testament’ types to be included in the Christian liturgical calendar (for August 1).

In the chapter she has contributed to the current volume, M. J. Toswell gives a pen-portrait of an ideal writer of a dictionary:

Those who read this passage will picture Professor Antonette diPaolo Healey perfecting the music of lexicography by working on one Old English word after another. Indeed, Professor Healey and other editors at the Dictionary of Old English project have produced thousands of lexicographical symphonies (that is, word entries) and enriched our field through the publications of word-albums (that is, fascicles). Every time we look up a word in the Dictionary of Old English (DOE), we can recognize the efforts of Toni and her colleagues to strike a balance among various components to create perfect harmony.

We are therefore very proud to present Professor Healey with this volume as ‘a small token’, to borrow from Roy Liuzza's chapter, of our ‘great gratitude – far more than words can express here – for her exemplary scholarship as well as her friendship and encouragement’ (p. 198). Professor Healey is many things to members in the field of Old English studies. Stephen Pelle reminds us that she has also published the editio princeps of the Old English Vision of St. Paul, a text that is of great interest not only to Anglo-Saxonists but also to scholars in many other fields (p. 80). As Damian Fleming points out, she is ‘an exceptional classroom teacher’ who ‘has surely earned a place in the field as exalted as Bede or Ælfric‘(p. 199). But above all, Professor Healey is without doubt the Old English lexicographer of our time: as Donald Scragg writes, ‘she will go down in the history of our subject with Joseph Bosworth and Thomas Northcote Toller’ (p. 228).