This book began with transcription of a fragmentary text found in a manuscript in Cambridge, Gonville & Caius College, MS 98/50. The text turned out to be part of the Tabula medicine, which plays such a large role in the story of friars’ medicine in England. The transcribed fragment of Latin text featured names of medical figures who were not the usual suspects as medical authorities, that is doctors with an university background. Some clues suggested they might be English friars, but it was only when Neil Ker's Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries helped me to identify the fragment as a part of the Tabula medicine that this could be confirmed. The Tabula medicine had attracted no attention from historians of English medicine, and English friars had been hitherto given no role to play as medical practitioners or authors. My friend and colleague Linda Ehrsam Voigts was working on the fifteenth-century Cambridge and London physician Roger Marchall and found this fragment written in his hand in a manuscript he later gave to Gonville Hall. She shared her transcription with me, and such generosity has been a constant refrain in writing this book.

Despite Covid lockdowns and restrictions this book is largely based on manuscripts seen in person in libraries, supplemented with digital facsimiles where available. I am glad to have the opportunity to thank the staff of beleaguered libraries, especially those responsible for the manuscripts of the Bodleian Library, the British Library, Cambridge University Library and the Wellcome Library. The college libraries too, Corpus Christi, Gonville & Caius, Jesus, King’s, Peterhouse, St John’s, Trinity Colleges in Cambridge and Corpus Christi, Merton and New Colleges in Oxford, have all been of great help, gratefully acknowledged here. The Library of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science in Cambridge has supplied me with books, and news of books. I would like to thank the staff of these libraries for their personal assistance, as well as acknowledge their generosity in allowing me access to their manuscripts, and to quote from them.

In finding my way into the history of English friars, I have been lucky enough to have had the encouragement and guidance of Michael Robson, the leading historian of Franciscanism and English friars in general. He has guided my way into the historical sources as well as allowing me to benefit from information drawn from his database of English Franciscans.