Dr Hope Williard is a postdoctoral researcher on the NWO-Vidi project 'Lettercraft and Epistolary Performance in Early Medieval Europe’, where she will be contributing to the design of the project database and researching the surprisingly wide range of people involved in letter exchange. She is the author of a book about friendship in the early Middle Ages, Friendship in the Merovingian Kingdoms: Venantius Fortunatus and His Contemporaries (ARC Humanities Press, 2022). Her wider interests include late antique and early medieval literature, the transformation of late Roman society and culture during a time of great change, and how people of the time used the former to cope with the latter.