We know almost nothing about the anonymous authors of Euphrosyne, Eustace, Mary of Egypt, and The Seven Sleepers, except that each was interested in reading, translating, and transmitting one of these four texts. Each of the four essays in this collection explores what those reasons might have been. None of the four contributors uses Ælfric as the exclusive lens for analysis, and each piece adopts a different theoretical or methodological approach to the text in question; in the process, the four anonymous texts are put into conversation with the Gospels, Freudian psychoanalysis, a fragmentary, fire-damaged manuscript, Old English homilies, and a novel published in 2006. In offering four new essays on the anonymous interpolations in Ælfric's Lives of Saints that take four very different approaches to the texts in question, we hope to open additional lines of inquiry into the lives of the se saints and to promote new scholarship on the anonymous hagiography of Anglo-Saxon England.

Ars musice, composed in Paris in the late thirteenth century, reflects Johannes de Grocheio's awareness of the complexity of the task of describing music. . . . Grocheio is aware of the enormous range of types of music performed in different ways in different places. How can he impose order on this enormous subject matter. He decided to resolve this question by structuring his discussion around the practice of music that he observed in the city of Paris, organized into three main "branches": music of the people (musica vulgalis), composite or regular, "which they call measured music" (musica mensurata), and ecclesiastical music (musica ecclesiastica), which he claims derives from the other two. The originality of Grocheio's treatise has attracted considerable scholarly interest. It has long been recognized as a unique source of information about musical life in Paris. Through his treatise, Grocheio enables a modern reader to become aware of the complex auditory environment of that city in the late thirteenth century as well as of its intellectual vitality at a particularly vibrant moment in its history.

The book features a section of appreciations of Bryce Lyon followed by three sections on the major areas on which Lyon's research concentrated: the legacy of Henri Pirenne, constitutional and legal history of England and the Continent, and the economic history of the Low Countries. Original essays by Bernard S. Bachrach, David S. Bachrach, Jan Dumolyn, Caroline Dunn, Jelle Haemers, John H. A. Munro, James M. Murray, Anthony Musson, David Nicholas, W. Mark Ormrod, Walter Prevenier, Jeff Rider, Don C. Skemer, and Marci Sortor deepen our understanding of Lyon's career and siginificance and further our knowledge of the areas in which he worked.

In the introduction to Saints at Play, Hamblin notes that "this approach is intended to strengthen a comparative analysis of relatively similar texts created within a particular cultural setting. [The plays'] somewhat parallel narratives and performative structures facilitate their comparison as performance remnants. . . . To that end, the first three chapters will investigate the cultural contexts in which these plays were produced and performed, as well as the cultural content that spoke to and for the communities that created them. In two subsequent chapters, the performance features of these remnants, verbal and nonverbal, textual and supratextual, will be compared in search of evidence of a collective performance history. Anomalies and questions regarding these texts as reminiscent of a performative past will be posited and conclusions drawn as to how these texts expressed contemporary social perspectives at both localized and generic levels.