Jacques Le Goff was born in 1924 at Toulon. He taught in a lycee at Amiens in 1950-1 and then held research studentships at Lincoln College, Oxford and the Ecole francaise de Rome. Since then he has taught at the Ecole practique des hautes etudes, rising to the position of president of the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales 1975-7. He is director of the prestigious journal Annales. He has published many books; best known to English readers are Pour un autre Moyen Age (Paris 1977), translated as Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago, 1980) and La naisssance du purgatoire (Paris 1981), translated as The Borth of Purgatory (Chicago 1984).


Julia Barrow, a medievalist with a special interest in church history, took her MA in St Andrews in 1978 and her D.Phil in Oxford in 1983. At present she holds a British Academy Post-doctoral fellowship at Birmingham University.