Married with five children, Howell A. Lloyd is a graduate of the universities of Wales and Oxford. In the course of a career which culminated in ten years' service as pro-vice-chancellor and deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Hull, he has taught and researched an unusually wide variety of historical subjects. His publications - monographs, edited works, and numerous essays - deal with topics in late-medieval and early-modern British and European history that range from social and economic questions to military affairs, from constitutional and governmental structures to political ideas, from mathematics to historiography itself. He is therefore especially well-equipped for the study of the subject of the present book, the prolific and many-sided scholar, Jean Bodin.