Thirteenth Century England 2019 brought together scholars from the UK and beyond, giving rise to papers that responded in varied ways to the conference's theme, the provocation ‘Exceptional England?’. It is a counterpart to the 2017 conference, which asked scholars to think explicitly about England in Europe. This pair of conferences were responding to long-term historiographical trends among British medievalists, one of which strove to Europeanise England and Britain and the other which sought instead, either explicitly or implicitly, to emphasise the differences between developments in England and those elsewhere. Both conferences took place within that window of British history between the EU referendum in 2016 and the Covid Pandemic of 2020, when talk of ‘Brexit’ dominated Westminster, the media, and university common rooms. While politics moves on, we hope that these two volumes provide a contribution by new and established scholars on issues that remain pertinent to any study of medieval Europe.

Scholars have long observed the perils of an insular outlook. The late Susan Reynolds, as Agata Zielinska notes in her essay, sounded a warning at the Thirteenth Century England Conference held in 1997 about the dangers of thinking and writing, consciously or not, within national frameworks. And yet, more than two decades later, Nicholas Vincent makes a similar point in the present volume about the ongoing ‘tendency of historians, on both sides of the Channel, to focus upon sources confined chiefly within (future) national bound¬aries’. Many of the essays collected respond to the challenge to think beyond those bounds. In so doing, they also help to set a new course for future confer¬ences. The 2019 iteration was also the first ‘Thirteenth Century’ conference, a title the gathering will continue to bear in future years. This institutionalises the broadened horizons reflected in this collection of essays, though the numbering from the Thirteenth Century England Series will be retained, recognising a vital continuity with the very significant corpus of scholarship accumulated during almost forty years of the conference's existence.