Scholar, teacher, collector and bibliophile, Toshiyuki Takamiya has been a central figure in the study of medieval English literary texts for almost four decades, not only in his native Japan but also among Western literary scholars worldwide. This exciting collection of essays, centred on late medieval English manuscripts and their texts, honours the contributions he has made in this field. It includes essays by internationally known scholars, offering new insights into the works of canonical literary writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, William Langland, Walter Hilton and Nicholas Love, as well as lesser-known or anonymous texts and manuscripts. Some articles offer new readings of texts, or new evidence in response to important questions about the authorship, transmission or use of medieval English texts. Others offer new insights into medieval books, their producers, readers, and collectors. This collection of ground-breaking essays is thus a fitting tribute to one the foremost scholars of the history of the book, Professor Toshiyuki Takamiya, whom it honours.

As both scholar and collector, Professor Takamiya's life and career have been devoted to the study of medieval manuscripts and their texts. In another volume dedicated to him, The Medieval Book and a Modern Collector: Essays in Honour of Toshiyuki Takamiya, its editors Takami Matsuda, Richard Linenthal and John Scahill in their Editors’ Preface (pp. xiii–xvi) summarized Takamiya’s illustrious career, from boyhood schooling through professorship at Keio University, Japan’s oldest and most revered university: two being his colleagues at Keio, and the third his book-collecting advisor and agent, they knew more of the facts about his life and career than I. What I would add, that also comes out in individual tributes in both that volume and this, is the gratitude of many scholars for the warmth and generosity of Takamiya’s personality that have led us to wish to pay further tribute to him. No other modern collector or owner of medieval manuscripts has befriended the scholars working in the field as Takamiya has done, none is so well known as a frequent presence at international gatherings of scholars, none has so willingly enabled scholars to conduct studies of the books in his collection as he has done.