In February 2020, when the Faculty Development Committee of The King’s College, New York City, announced it would award me a sabbatical to work on a manuscript edition of the English Apocalypse, none of us knew that the entire landscape of higher education was about to change dramatically. Nevertheless, after two semesters of teaching online and hybrid courses during the COVID-19 pandemic, I was able to take a release from teaching in Spring 2021. I am deeply grateful to the college’s faculty and administration for their generosity — this book would not exist without it. Thank you in particular to Dr. Matthew Parks, the FDC chair, and the rest of the committee members who saw value in the project, and to Provost Mark Hijleh, who gave it final approval.

The late Dr. Russell Peck, General Editor of the Middle English Texts Series, was the first to agree to publish this book — I am thankful for his confidence in the project and saddened for the METS team who have lost a wonderful colleague. Thank you especially to Pamela Yee, Managing Editor, who saw me through several early attempts at transcription. She worked patiently to get the formatting right and gave me encouragement to finish, even while working on her own PhD dissertation. Associate Editors Alan Lupack and Susanna Fein did comprehensive reads of the manuscript after its completion, staff editors Eleanor Price and Phillip Zaborny collated my transcriptions against the manuscripts, staff editors Daniel Kephart and Phillip Zaborny completed the bibliography check, and Steffi Delcourt, James Norris, and other editors formatted the edition in publishing software — I am grateful for the whole team’s professionalism and attention to detail. Special thanks go as well to the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH), which has funded METS for the duration of its existence.

The pandemic made working on a manuscript edition particularly challenging, as it disrupted my initial plans to visit libraries in the UK and New York City in person. Instead, I relied on the generosity of several librarians and professors in both countries who sent me photographs of medieval manuscripts so I could view them on my computer.

Thank you first and foremost to Dr. Emily Runde, Curator of Medieval and Renaissance Collections at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Though I had taken my own photographs of the Plimpton manuscript before the library closed to in-person research, she supplied me with crucial additional photos where mine were blurry, and even took close-up shots of specific sections of manuscript pages so I could see the granular detail of the margins, erasures, insertions, and other features that would normally be visible only with a physical inspection. Thank you also to Catherine Sutherland, Deputy Librarian at the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge University, who supplied the images for a supplementary manuscript copy of the English Apocalypse.

A special thanks to Dr. Daniel Sawyer, Fitzjames Research Fellow in Medieval English Literature at Merton College, Oxford University, who not only generously provided me with photographs from the two manuscripts at the Bodleian Library that I used to produce the Wycliffite Apocalypse edition in this book, but who also gave me helpful advice about transcription and interpreting scribal abbreviations. Dr. Sawyer has worked with the Wycliffite Bible project at Oxford, led by Dr. Elizabeth Solopova, which has provided scholars with invaluable information about hundreds of extant Wycliffite Bible manuscripts and their production histories. Dr. Anne Hudson, who was also affiliated with the project, left behind an immense legacy as the preeminent scholar of Wycliffite and Lollard texts when she passed away in December 2021.

My first experience reading an English Apocalypse manuscript was at the British Library’s Manuscripts Reading Room in 2010 while working on my PhD dissertation, and the staff there were immensely helpful as I embarked on my first research journey as a medievalist. Thank you also to the unnamed staff members who made full-color images of MS Harley 874, the oldest extant copy of the English Apocalypse, freely available to the public through the British Library’s website. Librarians at institutions like these around the world provide an exceedingly valuable service to scholars and readers of medieval manuscripts and other archival materials. Their contributions are often anonymous or overlooked, but their labor makes a book like this one, as well as every printed edition of a manuscript text, possible.

Though he doesn’t know it, Dr. James Morey of Emory University is partly responsible for inspiring this project. At a conference called “Transforming Scripture” at St. Anne’s College, Oxford University in 2014, Dr. Morey gave a presentation on non-Wycliffite Middle English translations of the Bible which included a discussion of the English Apocalypse and the quirks of its various manuscripts, and in a conversation afterward, he pointed me to the Plimpton manuscript at Columbia University.

Thank you to my colleagues in the English program at The King’s College, Dr. Kelly Lehtonen and Prof. Lynda Kong, and all of the students in the English major — I hope we can continue to support each other in more book projects in the future. Thanks also to the students who worked as my Faculty Assistants while I completed this project: Elaina Bals, Gracie McBride, Ellen Scott, and Mattie Townson.

Lastly, thank you to my wife Alice and my children Jonah and Maddie, to whom this book is dedicated, and to my parents for giving all of us a restful place to work and vacation in Nebraska during two pandemic summers. The kids were home at our apartment in Brooklyn doing online school for about half of the time during my sabbatical, so they got to watch Dad spend many hours poring over old manuscript images and laboring to write. I will always cherish those days we all spent together — I love you, and you make everything worth it.