It is a pleasure to thank in print the people on whose help and encouragement we have drawn while making this edition.

Alison would like to thank Fraser Dallachy, Joanna Kopaczyk-McPherson, Ryan Perry, Rhiannon Purdie, Lydia Zeldenrust, and attendees of the 12th International Conference on Middle English, who offered responses and questions in a workshop session on editing the Seven Sages.

For engaging conversations about the Seven Sages, Rory is grateful to researchers whom he met at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds in 2022 and in 2023, including Ulrike Becker, Bettina Bildhauer, Jane Bonsall, Caitlin Flynn, Lilli Hölzlhammer, Emilie van Opstall, and Victoria Turner. In 2022 and again in 2023, Rory taught a course at Lausanne entitled “The Seven Sages of Rome in England and the World.” His students worked through drafts of this edition and their feedback fed into its development.

We are both keen to thank Jane Bonsall, Michelle Karnes, Elizabeth Robertson, Jeremy Smith, and Graham Williams, who read drafts of parts of this edition and shared their expertise with us. In our work on the Auchinleck Manuscript, we continue to be inspired by the scholarship of David Burnley. At METS, for their work on our work, we are grateful to Nick Anderson, Daniel Kephart, Alan Lupack, James Norris, Eleanor Price, David Raybin, Anna Siebach-Larsen, and, in particular, Pamela Yee. We commend the National Endowment for the Humanities for supporting METS and are proud to contribute a volume to this series, which has done so much to reinvigorate teaching and research in our field. Our greatest debts are to editors past. The work of Karl Brunner, Killis Campbell, and Jill Whitelock undergirds our text and apparatus. The editorial and critical work of Mary B. Speer and Yasmina Foehr-Janssens also fundamentally informs this re-presentation of the Middle English Seven Sages.

We hope that this edition of the Middle English Seven Sages of Rome will inspire a new generation of scholars and students to engage in fresh analyses of the text’s language, themes, manuscripts, and readers.