We are continuing our policy of including some of the papers held at our regional symposia. Four contributions, by Alex Metcalfe, Andrew Jotischky, Naomi Tadmor and Michael Beckerman, come from the symposium ‘Edges of Europe: Frontiers in Context’ organised at the University of Lancaster on 16–17 June 2011. The article by Michael Beckerman and his collaborators represents a new departure for us, as the lecture was accompanied by a series of audio recordings which are available on the Cambridge University website (http://journals.cambridge.org/rht). It is generically rather different from the material we normally publish, but we think it is an exciting piece.