Dr Luisa Ostacchini

My research broadly considers ideas of the world in medieval literature. 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; and medieval travel. I am also interested in questions of interconnectivity, inclusivity and intratextuality in medieval works, especially in collections of saints’ lives.

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. 

The Old English Martyrology

My current monograph project looks beyond Europe to the global world. To this end, I am working with one of the most extensive examples of vernacular encyclopedic writing in the entirety of the European Middle Ages, the ninth century text known as the Old English Martyrology. What interests me most about the OEM is the interrelation between its whole and its parts. I am interested not only in how medieval English writers were describing African and Asian places, but also in how they made sense of the globe as an entity; and in how that relationship between individual places and global whole is made manifest in the text's synthesis of diverse sources, ideas, languages, genres and saints into a single coherent work. This project, then, not only sheds new light on Medieval English engagement with the non-European world, but further illuminates translation practice, rationale and literary art behind one of the most important and most chronically understudied works of European medieval encyclopedic writing.