The current phase of the CIRCLE project began in 2008 with funding from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. But in fact the Irish Chancery Project was originally the brainchild of Jocelyn Otway-Ruthven, the formidable Lecky Professor of History at Trinity between 1951 and 1980. Work on the reconstruction first got under way in the late 1970s and was to have occupied Otway-Ruthven in her retirement. Unfortunately illness intervened and prevented her work from proceeding. In the late 1990s Dr Philomena Connolly, senior archivist in the National Archives of Ireland, revived the project, but sadly she too passed away in 2002 before her work could be completed. So it has taken some four decades and three principal editors (including the present writer), working unavoidably in fits and starts, to bring the new calendar to the point of publication.