Acknowledgements and Introduction Jacek Fisiak was a dominant figure in English studies in Poland for several decades (especially in linguistics and in medieval studies), but he also knew that scholarship is and has always been international, and he acted accordingly. He organized many international conferences and he helped numerous colleagues from home and from abroad at various stages of their career, among many others also the editors of the present volume. As a small sign of our gratitude, we have assembled this volume in his memory. Jacek Fisiak had sixty doctoral students; there were many younger colleagues whose habilitation (postdoctoral degree) he supervised or where he wrote a review, and he enjoyed the friendship and admiration of many colleagues in Poland and abroad. Therefore, the present volume can only accommodate a fraction of his colleagues and former students, and his international outreach is also reflected only partly. The contributors come from Poland, but also from England, Germany, Spain, and the USA. Our thanks are due to the publisher, to the contributors of this volume, and to the colleagues who provided important information or helped with the assembling and formatting of the volume; we mention in particular: his wife Liliana Sikorska, furthermore Magdalena Bator, Marlene Sauer and Gaby Waxenberger. We also thank the universities and faculties that supported this volume financially, in particular the University of Wrocław, Poland, and the School of Languages and Literatures and the Faculty of English at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland (UAM). We have organized the volume into six Parts: Part I sketches Jacek Fisiak’s biography and provides a list of his numerous publications, and gives some personal memoirs by his wife, by colleagues and friends; Part II contains articles that deal with Old and Middle English literature; Part III has articles that discuss aspects of the history of English and of historical linguistics; Part IV centers on Medievalism and the rendering of a Shakespearean drama for a production on the contemporary Polish stage; Part V assembles studies dealing with Modern English, contrastive studies, and translation studies. Parts II and III have some overlap, because some contributions in Part II also discuss linguistic issues. But most of the articles in Part II start from specific
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