As I listened to the roundtable reflections, and later read the written versions, my first reaction was gratitude. First, of course, to the generous roundtable participants who had already taught me so much through their scholarship and whose incisive observations have now helped me think more deeply and critically about my own. Second, to the Canadian Historical Association and the editors of its Journal for convening this roundtable — just knowing that my book is being read is exciting enough, but to have a chance to learn how it is being read, and what questions (or criticisms) it is sparking among readers, is a rare privilege. And finally, to the members of the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize jury for bestowing such a signal honour on my book, thus affirming (for the second year in a row!) that the arguments and methods of a book about the Middle Ages might resonate beyond the cadre of card-carrying medievalists. What struck me next, upon reading these reflections, is the sizable gap between the research questions that launched this project and the book that I ended up writing. The latter, as the roundtable discussion makes clear, builds from a simple observation: During the two centuries preceding the Black Death, every major polity in western Europe that expelled its Jewish community also ordered the expulsion of foreign Christians accused of lending at usury. To chart the relationship between these phenomena, No Return ranges widely across time (from the early twelfth century until the end of the fifteenth), place (most of medieval Latin Christendom), and source genres (from fiscal accounts to vernacular poetry). As several of the roundtable contributions observe, law and legal commentaries figure prominently in the book, especially as vehicles for spreading and normalizing what I call the “usury-expulsion nexus,” that is, the medieval notion that expulsion was a fitting — even necessary — response to usury. And while one of the book’s most obvious conclusions is that medieval expulsions of Jews cannot be fully understood in isolation from the wider landscape of expelling practices in medieval society, No Return also seeks to make a more general point: that expulsion can (and should) be historicized in the same way that scholars have historicized incarceration, by exploring its emergence, diffusion, forms, mutations, targets, and proponents. This concern with expulsion as a historical (and “historicizable”) phenomenon has been a through line for the project from start to finish, but at the outset the scope and approach were rather different. My initial research agenda focused on the expulsion of foreign mercantile communities in high and late medieval Europe, and I was particularly drawn to economic questions (e.g., what was the impact of such expulsions on both the merchants and the communities from which they were expelled?) and what such incidents might reveal about evolving ideas of foreignness. I knew that medieval anxieties about usury and moneylending would figure somewhere in the story, but I hardly imagined that these would become a central theme. The same was true for law. (That I had done very poorly on the final exam for an undergraduate course in medieval law was further reason to steer as far from the topic as possible!) And while I expected that medieval expulsions of Jews would figure occasionally as points of comparison, I never imagined that they would become central to the book’s argument and structure. If I am dwelling at some length on the book’s intellectual trajectory, this is because its trajectory has some bearing on its conclusions — and, more immediately, on some of the points raised in the roundtable discussion. If usury …
