From the Editors

Abstract

Dear JMRC Readers,We sincerely wish to thank our readers, contributors, and board members over the years for their support of JMRC. After many years of coediting (over ten for Christine Cooper-Rompato and five for Sherri Olson), we have decided to step down and hand the journal on to the next generation of coeditors, Barbara Zimbalist and Jessica Barr. Barbara Zimbalist is a newly promoted associate professor of English at the University of Texas El Paso with a specialty in medieval women's religious literatures from England and the Low Countries, and Jessica Barr is an associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a specialty in medieval European vision literature and hagiography. Together they have great plans for future directions for the journal. We look forward to seeing JMRC continue to grow and to maintain the important place that it has held for nearly forty years in the ranks of smaller, specialized journals that particularly welcome the contributions of younger scholars.JMRC was originally founded in 1974 as the 14th Century English Mystics Newsletter by Valerie M. Lagorio and Ritamary Bradley. The newsletter became Mystics Quarterly in 1984 under the editorship of Lagorio and Bradley. In 1991, Elizabeth Psakis Armstrong took over the editorship until passing it to Alexandra Barratt in 1997. Barratt then passed MQ on to Bob Hasenfratz in 2005, and he was joined by Cooper-Rompato in 2008. Hasenfratz started the process of reimagining the journal with a broader, more interdisciplinary focus, and in 2010 JMRC published its first issue from Pennsylvania State University Press. When Hasenfratz stepped down from the journal to become a department chair, Olson joined Cooper-Rompato as coeditor in 2015.We have been working happily together since then. Both of us are being drawn in new directions by professional and personal obligations, which have made it necessary to relinquish the editorship of JMRC. We are delighted to turn the reins over to Zimbalist and Barr. We wish them the very best. We would also like to thank Paul Patterson, our book review editor, who will also be stepping down at this time after dedicating many years to the journal. In addition, we owe a debt of gratitude to the PSUP journals editors, production managers, and production assistants, especially Rachel Ginder, Julie Lambert, Astrid Meyer, and Diana Pesek, who have nurtured and helped us produce JMRC for the last decade. We also must thank all of PSUP's copyeditors who have worked tirelessly with authors and editors alike to improve the journal's writing.Before signing off, we owe yet another thank you to all those presenters and audience members who have attended the MQ-and JMRC-sponsored sessions at Kalamazoo over the years. We look forward to being audience members (and perhaps panelists) in future years!Many thanks,Christine and Sherri