A two-page abstract of the book.

A survey of the foundational disciplines of literate culture in the British isles, from the failure of the Roman imperial project in the fifth century to Henry VIII’s promulgation of uniform Latin grammars in 1540-42.

Grammar and rhetoric were the disciplines charged with teaching correct and effective use of language in antiquity. In the M…[Read more]

As in other early language traditions, premodern English poetry was written out with very light punctuation. The sparsity of manuscript punctuation appears especially problematic in the period before 1200, when poetry in English lacked visual linebreaks. The difficulties of parsing this poetry are substantial. Modern editors of Old English verse…[Read more]

From the twelfth century to the seventeenth, political prophecy was prominent among English literary genres no less than in English political life. Derived from Welsh poetic tradition via Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin History of the Kings of Britain, prophecy reached all social classes. Prophetic texts influenced the decisions of kings, shaped p…[Read more]

I was the invited respondent for this panel of papers jointly-sponsored by the CLCS Celtic and Old English MLA Forums. These are the remarks which I prepared in response to the papers in order to help draw them together into a frame to generate discussion, and which were read for me in abstentia.

Syllabus and Course Reader (Creative Commons Licensed) of survey course of premodern Hispanic literature and culture taught as a series of debates on social questions (see https://davidwacks.uoregon.edu/2017/12/14/survey4/)

Course description: This class introduces students to a variety of texts written in Spain and the New World from 1100-1600…[Read more]

Syllabus and Course Reader (Creative Commons Licensed) of survey course of premodern Hispanic literature and culture taught as a series of debates on social questions (see https://davidwacks.uoregon.edu/2017/12/14/survey4/)

Course description: This class introduces students to a variety of texts written in Spain and the New World from 1100-1600…[Read more]

Reading of two medieval Spanish ballads featuring fairies in light of ethnographic evidence of fairy consciousness in Spain

This is a paper in comparative phonology, which undertakes a detailed comparative analysis of the standard British English RP (Received Pronunciation) vowel system, and that of standard French, including some observations on regional varieties.

In the article, we trace some aspects of development of eventivity and narrativity in Medieval and early Modern Era travel literature. Dissecting episodes of Sir Thomas Smithes Voiage and Entertainment in Rushia (1605), A Travel of Anonimous Citizen of Suzdal to The Council of Florence (15th century), Russian Primary Chronicle (12th century), and…[Read more]

In this paper I look at how “Exenplo XI” is both product and reflection of the various traditions and cultures of medieval Iberia and how Juan Manuel forges a new version of this story from these inherited traditions in order to showcase problems of concern to his fourteenth-century audience, namely, the tension between ecclesiastical and And…[Read more]

This study imagines a Sephardic archive not as a physical site that houses the artifacts, texts, and history of a nation-state or Empire, but one that allows us to access those objects (or exposes their absence) and to bring artifacts from different official archives into dialogue in a different, virtual space, thus creating an additional, but not…[Read more]