While I cannot claim to be a close friend of Bill Cook, I have seen enough of him over the years to recognise that he is both a good man and an extremely interesting one. More to the point, I have been consistently impressed by the dedication with which he has pursued his major scholarly passion, early visual representations of St Francis, and the quality of his work in that field. The essays collected in this Festschrift examine a wide variety of topics stretching from the thirteenth to the twenty-first century (though most involve St Francis in some way) and predictably vary in quality. Perhaps it was also predictable that my favourites should be essays dealing with Cook's major preoccupation. Bradley Franco contributes an essay entitled ‘The functions of early Franciscan art’ which clearly and concisely tells us just that, no small accomplishment; while Alexandra Dodson's ‘Trial by fire: St Francis and the sultan in Italian art’ raises questions so relevant to my own research that I barely resisted the temptation to fire off an email asking them. Yet the article that I most enjoyed pondering is one that barely mentions St Francis: Sarah Ritchey's ‘Illness and imagination: the healing miracles of Clare of Montefalco’, which offers insight not only into why doctors and healing saints could coexist in medieval Montefalco but also what modern doctors might learn from it all. Cook's own closing essay, ‘My life with Saint Francis’, offers disarmingly modest reminiscences and in the process provides an example of how, unwittingly, we often back into the very topics that will sustain us for the rest of our lives.