Dr Niamh Kehoe

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 book, Humour and Holiness in Medieval English Hagiographies c.900–c.1300 is under contract with Boydell & Brewer, and is the first sustained exploration of the execution, purpose, and development of humour in vernacular saints’ lives circulating in England from pre- to post-Conquest. 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.

Published Work

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. My research articles on Old English have been published in leading international peer-reviewed journals including the Review of English Studies, JEGP, and the SELIM journal. I have also edited a Special Issue of English Studies on ‘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 (Düsseldorf).

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 2027.

Public Engagement

"Ælfric of Cerne: A Literary Giant", a lecture co-delivered on 10th January 2026 with Prof. Francis Leneghan to the Cerne Historical Society: https://roep.site.ox.ac.uk/events/aelfric-cerne-literary-giant.

Old English Workshops, Cerne Abbas, 25th April 2026: part of the wider public engagement with Cerne Abbas Historical Society as part of Prof. Francis Leneghan's AHRC-funded project on Old English Prose.

Other 

From 2025–2026 I was the Research Assistant for the AHRC-funded project on Old English Prose. I assisted with building the website Resources for Old English Prose, co-organised a graduate workshop, a two-day conference (New Directions in Old English Prose), co-delivered a public lecture in Cerne Abbas in Dorset, and represented the project at ISSEME 2025 in Düsseldorf. 

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.