In Memoriam:Audrey Meaney (1931–2021) Sybil Jack Click for larger view View full resolution Audrey Meaney died after a massive stroke on 8 January 2021, to the great distress of her children and friends. She had been a major contributor to uncovering the history and culture of Anglo-Saxon England for over seventy years and it could be said that she died with her pen still in her hands. Thirty years ago, in 1990, the various Australian Medieval and Early Modern groups that she had helped found, especially the Sydney Medieval and Renaissance Group and the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, were sadly farewelling her as she retired from Macquarie University to move back to Cambridge. She was already one of the most internationally distinguished writers and researchers on the Anglo-Saxon period, admired for her 'monumental output', her pioneering contribution to the archaeology of medicine and magic, and her scrupulous, painstaking scholarship. She had succeeded in making the agency of women in the practice of magic undeniable. She was also acknowledged as one of the academics who had established Macquarie as a first-class university. Its vice-chancellor, Di Yerbury, had paid tribute to her critical role with the words: Her contribution to Macquarie University extended deep into its fabric and well-being. She was very influential in the early development of the new University's teaching programs. She was active in several [End Page xiii] committees and took on the responsibilities of Acting Head of the School of English and Linguistics. She quietly but persistently promoted the role of women and women's studies. Indeed, her interest in the role of women has been a dominant theme in her research into Anglo-Saxon culture, removing yet another layer of invisibility over women's place in history. The volume of Parergon that was subsequently dedicated to her (n.s., 10.2, 1992) collected accounts of much of the work that had occupied her academic career to date as well as reflecting on her contribution to the establishment of medieval studies—especially interdisciplinary studies—in her lifetime of employment in Australia. She had come to Australia to a post at the university of New England after completing her PhD at Cambridge in 1959, when she was still using her maiden name, Savill. On the ship out to Australia she had met and married Neville Meaney, an Australian historian, and adopted his name for her later publications. Her early years in Australia, spent in various temporary positions in the English department at the University of Sydney, were complicated by bearing and managing three children while maintaining a full-time university career, a rare achievement for a married woman at that time. It was her drive in the 1960s that helped start the interdisciplinary bodies that brought together academics from different areas in medieval and early modern studies—languages, art, history, archaeology, and others—and persuaded them that they had more in common than they had previously believed. It also led her to many comparative ideas in her own research into religion and medicine in Anglo-Saxon culture. She had no intention of stopping her research on her retirement, however, and maintained her links to Australia after 1990 with periodic visits in which she was usually persuaded to talk about her recent work in Britain, where the key methodological premises she had set out for magic and witchcraft as well as the practice of medicine were now widely adopted. In the 1990s she was working on the position and distribution of pagan sanctuaries in Anglo-Saxon England and their relationship to later Christian sites—a study that led to further work by other academics in the field. She kept in touch with people researching the area by attending conferences. She continued to give papers that were widely published (for instance '"And we forbeodað eornostlice ælcne hæðenscipe": Wulfstan and Late Anglo-Saxon and Norse "Heathenism"', in Wulfstan, Archbishop of York: The Proceedings of the Second Alcuin Conference, ed. by Matthew Townend, Brepols, 2004, pp. 461–500). Although the book on 'Heathenism to Superstition in Anglo-Saxon England' she had planned in 1989 did not materialise, most...