The essays collected in this volume represent the fruition of multiple sessions held in memory of Jim Powell (1930–2011) at the Midwest Medieval History Conference (2011), the annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America (2012), the Western Michigan Medieval and Renaissance Conference at Kalamazoo (2012), the International Medieval Congress at Leeds (2012), and also at Syracuse University (2012), where Jim taught for over thirty years. These scholarly tributes bore eloquent testimony to Jim's beneficence, generosity, and intellectual influence on a wide range of academics working in fields as various as religious movements (from lay devotion and sermons to the Teutonic Order, the Trinitarians, Dominicans, and Franciscans), the crusades, the papacy and its relations with imperial and royal powers (notably Frederick II), Christian–Jewish–Islamic relations, and Italian communes. Further witness to Jim as a historian and as a fine human being came in the sensitive introduction by Edward Peters to the posthumous collection of Jim's essays printed in the former Ashgate Variorum series and a moving obituary written by Kenneth Pennington.1 Although some of the papers presented in Jim's honour are being published elsewhere, the essays presented here not only pay homage to Jim's lifetime accomplishments but also seek to highlight his contributions by pushing even further the boundaries of the fields in which he worked so fruitfully (perhaps at the risk of comparison to those medieval peasants rebuked by preachers for shifting boundary stones and encroaching on the carefully cultivated lands of others).

Mary Skinner's contribution on ‘Lay Initiative in the Early Peace of God Movement, 980–1020’ is a fitting opening to the volume as it examines a subject which was to be treated by Jim in many incarnations: peace. Jim was profoundly dedicated to reexamining the complexities of the concept and practice of peace and the way in which it interlaced with religious movements embraced by the laity, including confraternities, the mendicant orders, and the crusades.