Sarah James was delighted to join colleagues from the University of Sussex as they celebrated the launch of their Centre for Early Modern and Medieval Studies with a new lecture series. The Dove/Medcalf Lectures commemorate the work of two outstanding scholars at Sussex: the medievalist Mary Dove and the early-modernist Stephen Medcalf. As a good friend of Mary, Sarah was invited to give one of two inaugural lectures, alongside Professor Brian Cummings (University of York). Sarah’s lecture, ‘The English Elucidarium and the Politics of Reading’, examined ownership of Elucidarium manuscripts across social groups, and invited the audience to meditate upon the scholarly neglect for this important text, attributable, she suggested, to perceptions that it is ‘unacademic’.