My work on medieval literature focuses on the most widely produced texts — and most widely enjoyed by all — from the period: vernacular (Old English and early Middle English) and Latin hagiographic narratives. I’m interested in the changing presentations and concepts of holiness in vernacular English lives produced in pre- and early post-Conquest England, and what their engagement with their Latin source texts reveals concerning medieval attitudes towards saints. I’m especially interested in how narrative changes in saints’ lives inform our understanding of how holiness was understood, how it was useful to audiences, and what these texts can yield regarding changing discourses of morality, emotion, and exemplarity. My interests lie in both prose and verse lives, as well as in homilies, sermons, and other meditative and devotional works. My research also involves the material text and the troubled boundary between romance and hagiography.
Current Research
My first monograph, Humour and Holiness in Old and Middle English Hagiography, will be the first sustained exploration of the execution, purpose, and development of humour in vernacular saints’ lives circulating in England from the time of Cynewulf to Chaucer. It will also be the first study to contextualise the varying use of humour in terms of changing church teachings, the rise in private devotion and of affective piety, growing literacy, and the effects of the emerging romance genre. Considering aspects such as form, style, gender of the saint, political and cultural contexts of production and reception, and pedagogical and rhetorical purposes, this monograph constitutes the first sustained comprehensive account of how the use/form of humour in the most popular genre of medieval narrative changed from pre- to post-Conquest England.
Another strand of my current research examines the manuscript dispersal and contents of the Middle English collection of metrical saints’ lives known as the South English Legendary (SEL). Rather than attempting to reconstruct the identity of the writer(s), original audience(s), or the original aim of these texts (all of which remain obscure), my research questions what manuscript compilations can reveal regarding the pastoral, emotional and religious needs of the communities that used them. In taking this approach, I interrogate the troubled boundary of romance and hagiography by shifting the focus to examine what individual manuscripts tell us about the needs of their readers — broadly accepted by critics to have been the regional gentry rather than clergy.
Articles and editing
My research articles on Old English have been published in leading international peer-reviewed journals including the Review of English Studies, JEGP (the latter forthcoming in 2025), and also the SELIM journal. I have edited a special issue of English Studies, ‘Emotion, Morality, and Exemplarity in Old English Literature’ — this issue arose from a highly successful international conference I organised in 2021, ‘Morality, Exemplarity, & Emotion in Medieval Insular Texts, c. 700-c. 1500’, hosted and funded by Heinrich Heine Universität. I have three short chapters forthcoming with Palgrave for the project Women in Early Medieval England: A Florilegium. My published work has engaged with medieval attitudes towards holiness, source study, humour and horror theory, emotion and affect studies, gender studies, reader-reception, and reading and manuscript culture.
Upcoming projects
My next research project is (provisionally) titled Shaping Moral Identities at the Intersection of the Self, Community, and the Divine in Early Medieval England. A natural expansion upon my current research on humour, holiness, and pedagogy, this project pursues the textual presentation and renegotiation of moral identities across key genres, including heroic, biblical, and religious verse; chronicles and law codes; Alfredian prose; and prose sermons, homilies, and saints’ lives. I plan to propose a monograph on this material in 2026.
Other experience
From 2020-2021 I was a researcher on the UKRI-funded project, ‘The Human Remains’, at the University of Liverpool (https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/archaeology-classics-and-egyptology/research...). My role was to identify and collate one area of the project’s medieval corpus of primary sources — the translations (exhumations) of saints — and to translate Latin material.
At St Hilda’s, I teach Old English to first-year students (Prelims Paper 2) and Middle English to finalist undergraduates (FHS Course I Paper 2). In Hilary Term I will also teach on English Language (Prelims Paper 1a). I also teach OId English at St Edmund Hall (Prelims Paper 2), and at Merton College (Course II Paper 1).
Devising accessible and interesting ways to teach Old English language and literature is important to me, and from 2020 to 2022 I was co-editor of the annual newsletter published by the Teachers of Old English in Britain and Ireland (TOEBI) organisation.
I have run successful manuscript-based reading groups, introducing the basics of palaeography, at various institutions (University College Cork, Ireland; Newcastle University; University of Bonn, Germany) — watch this space!
