I specialize in Middle English literature, manuscript studies and editorial work. My current research focuses on English and European religious culture in the late Middle Ages. I am a postdoctoral researcher on the project Medieval Vernacular Bibles as Unity, Diversity and Conflict, run jointly by Dr Elizabeth Solopova and by Prof. Dr Freimut Löser (University of Augsburg). The project examines patterns of thought, methodolgy and influence among those advocating or undertaking vernacular bible translation in Europe in the later Middle Ages, with a particular focus on England and the German-speaking territories. As part of this, I am undertaking editorial work on British Library, MS Add. 24202, a compilation of polemical and devotional texts with a distinctly reformist flavour. Key areas of enquiry include:
- The interplay of papal and secular authority
- Nationalism in late-medieval reformist thought
- Church hierarchies in late-medieval England
- Wycliffite political thought
- Methods of compilation and production
- Editorial practice
In addition to my work on Medieval Vernacular Bibles, I am also preparing an edition: The Middle English Declaracion on the Bible, edited from Trinity College Oxford MS 93. This little-studied text, surviving in only a single copy, draws upon sources including the Wycliffite Bible, the Vulgate, Nicholas of Lyra’s Postilla, and the Glossa ordinaria to create a chapter-by-chapter summary of, and commentary on, the Bible. Likely compiled in the early 1390s, it is a key witness to the early experimentalism of academic Wycliffism. The edition, to be published by EETS, will comprise the New Testament and Apocrypha, with the Old Testament to follow later. On the Declaracion, see my essay ‘“Openliere and shortliere”: Methods of Exegesis and Abbreviation in a Wycliffite “summary” of the Bible’, in Wycliffism and Hussitism: Methods of Thinking, Writing and Persuasion, c. 1360-1460, ed. by Kantik Ghosh and Pavel Soukup (Brepols, 2021).
Also forthcoming are two major publications related to my previous role as a post-doctoral research assistant on the project Whittington’s Gift: Recovering the Lost Common Library of London’s Guildhall, run jointly by the University of Kent and Queen’s University Belfast. Both are co-edited by Dr Ryan Perry, Dr Stephen Kelly, Dr Natalie Calder and myself, and will be published in 2025:
- Meke Reverence and Devotion: A Reader in Late-Medieval Religious Writing (Liverpool University Press)
- Multiplicacioun of Manye Bookis: Entangled Communities, Texts and Manuscripts in Later Medieval London and Beyond (Liverpool University Press)
- To include my essay ‘“All suche clytter clatter’?: Medieval Devotional Compilations after the Reformation’
In the past I have taught Old and Middle English for a number of Oxford colleges, principally Somerville.
