Dr Luisa Ostacchini

My research broadly considers ideas of the world in medieval literature, and the role that the lives of saints played in constructing early medieval worldviews. In particular, I am interested in how writers and scholars from early medieval England (650-1100) were thinking about places outside of England, and how they saw their relationship to the global world around them. To this end, my interests largely move between the interrelated areas of translation between Latin and the vernacular; pre-modern national and international identity; medieval cosmography; the cult of saints; and medieval travel. I am also interested in questions of interconnectivity, inclusivity and intratextuality in medieval works, especially in collections of saints’ lives.

The Old English Martyrology

I am currently writing a monograph on the Mercian worldview of one of medieval England's longest and most impressive prose texts, the Old English Martyrology. In this work, I am interested in both the text's global and outward-looking interests, and the Mercian identity at its heart. I examine both the wide-ranging geographies of this chronically understudied text and the extensive network of Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Syriac sources and atecedent sources which facilitated its production. This project, then, sheds new light on Medieval English engagement with the non-European world; grants fresh insight into Mercian cultural identity; and further illuminates translation practice, rationale and literary art behind one of the most important and most neglected works of European medieval encyclopedic writing. I have recently published work from this project on the martyrologist's use of a portent from ancient Egypt and on the depiction of Carthage in the OEM.

Ælfric of Eynsham

My first book, Translating Europe in Ælfric’s ‘Lives of Saints’ (2024, Oxford University Press) focused on the relationship between England and Europe in the tenth century. Interest in England’s relationship with its European neighbours is by no means a modern phenomenon, and across his prodigious corpus Ælfric of Eynsham (c. 950–1010), the most prolific and stylistically accomplished prose writer in all Old English literature, writes repeatedly about the relationship between England and Europe. My book examines the representation of European places, people and community (and England's relationship with and ability to be part of that community) in his Lives of Saints, an extensive collection of stories about saints, most of whom are European. In doing so, I consider the ways in which Europe constituted a vital part of Ælfric’s didactic praxis concerning unity and the global church at a time of national crisis. I have also published on Ælfric's representation of India and Rome, on his use of sources in the Lives of Saints, and on his homiletic practice when translating material from Latin into the vernacular.