Having worked in the REED offices in Toronto as a graduate assistant for many years, I have had many opportunities to see and appreciate the incredible amount of dedication, hard work, collaboration, and expertise that goes into a REED collection. Now as an editor, I have the opportunity to feel gratitude for the large number of people, at REED and elsewhere, who help bring a collection to publication. Cambridgeshire is especially collaborative, as I inherited the collection after much of the archival work had been completed.
First and greatest thanks, then, must go to Anne Brannen for her diligent record collection and transcription. Secondly, Cambridgeshire would not have been what it is if not for Cambridge, both town and university, and this collection certainly owes much to Alan H. Nelson’s Cambridge edition.
I am also indebted to the editors both of published REED collections for those counties bordering Cambridgeshire (James Stokes and David Galloway) and of forthcoming collections, especially the REED East Anglia regional group of editors: John Craig, James Cummings, JoAnna Dutka, Peter Greenfield, Emily Mayne, Alan H. Nelson, and James Stokes. Within the REED-EA group, I also have to give special thanks to Sally-Beth MacLean and John Craig for their careful reviews and preliminary readings of the introduction, and Emily Mayne for her painstaking and invaluable editorial and translation work on the Italian records of John North. I also have to express my deep and sincere gratitude to Patrick Gregory, whose transcriptions and translations of the Holy Trinity guild accounts were invaluable.
I must also thank all the members of the REED editorial team and research associates. Each has been instrumental in bringing this collection to publication, whether through project management; paleographical transcription, checking, and translation; bibliographical checking; mapping and indexing; and on-site checks. In that order, these include: Tanya Hagen, for her diligent support as managing editor and bibliographer; Patrick Gregory, for his additional Latin paleography checks, translation and glossaries, beyond those noted above; Peter Greenfield, for volunteering his time on English paleography checks; Alexandra Atiya, graduate research assistant, for her checking of Latin translations; Sim Ong, graduate research assistant and bibliographic research assistant; Byron Moldofsky, our GIS cartographer and consultant; Illya Nokhrin, graduate research assistant, for his work on indexing and mapping; Jenna McKellips, graduate research assistant, for her work on indexing; and my doctoral student and research assistant, Nicholas Krizanic, for his careful work identifying locations named in the records. I am further grateful to our research associates Stephanie Hovland, and Stuart Palmer for their on-site checks at The National Archives and the Cambridgeshire Archives, respectively, as well as Alan Nelson’s volunteer service for on-site checks at the British Library.
More widely in the University of Toronto community, I am grateful for the exceptional resources available at Robarts Library, the Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies Library, and the library of the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. At home, the Queen Elizabeth II Library at Memorial University of Newfoundland was similarly invaluable in providing access to necessary sources; I am also grateful to the Department of English, the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, and Memorial University itself for funding portions of my research.
Of course my gratitude to the UK libraries and archives is great, and I thank the staff at The British Library, Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library, The National Archives, the Cambridgeshire Record Office, and the Wisbech and Fenland Museum (particular thanks to the curator, Robert Bell, who went above and beyond in providing reproductions and document descriptions in the midst of major renovations to the museum). I am likewise thankful to Philip Saunders and the Cambridgeshire Record Society for quick and friendly delivery of some essential texts.
Finally, I must thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the generous grant in support of REED-EA collections, with John Craig (Professor of History at Simon Fraser University and REED Executive Board Chair) as PI and Sally-Beth MacLean as co-PI (as REED General Editor and Director of Research). Special thanks are due to Dr Isabel Bader for her generous personal donation in support of this edition, and to the British Academy for their longstanding contribution to REED's work.