Contributions on fundamental aspects of medieval ecclesiastical history, demonstrating the importance of primary documents. The work of historians in providing new editions of primary documents, and other aids to research, has tended to go largely unsung, yet is crucial to scholarship, as providing the very foundations on which further enquiry can be based. The essays in this volume, conversely, celebrate the achievements in this field by a whole generation of medievalists, of whom the honoree, David Smith, is one of the most distinguished. They demonstrate the importance of such editions to a proper understanding and elucidation of a number of problems in medieval ecclesiastical history, ranging from thirteenth-century forgery to diocesan administration, from the church courts to the cloisters, and from the English parish clergy to the papacy. Contributors: CHRISTOPHER BROOKE, C.C. WEBB, JULIA BARROW, NICHOLAS BENNETT, JANET BURTON, CHARLES FONGE, CHRISTOPHER HARPER-BILL, R.H. HELMHOLZ, PHILIPPA HOSKIN, BRIAN KEMP, F. DONALD LOGAN, ALISON MCHARDY

Edition of medieval documents from St Mary's Collegiate Church, Warwick, provides valuable evidence for religious life of the time. The collegiate church of St Mary dominated the spiritual landscape of the medieval borough of Warwick, and from its foundation as a college in 1123 by Roger, earl of Warwick, it had a close relationship with its patrons, the earls. Its fifteenth-century cartulary charts that relationship and the development of the secular college from its inception, while its varied documents provide an important insight into the role of the college in local society and the interplay between the college, its canons, institutions and administrations, locally and nationally. This critical edition provides full transcripts of those documents produced before 1350, with detailed calendars of later documents. It is accompanied by a full transcript of the college's 1441 statutes and a biographical index of its fasti, with notes on their succession to prebends; and an introduction which examines the foundation of the college, its acquisition of property, and its constitutional development and character. CHARLES FONGE is University Archivist, University of Warwick.