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]

Document annotation is almost as old as writing. The designers of the World Wide Web envisioned a system that would allow people to publicly annotate any document. The advent of cloud computing has finally made this feasible: distributed annotation systems like Hypothes.is allow users to save annotations privately, or share them with the public.…[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.

This article argues that scholars must understand mass digitized texts as assemblages of new editions, subsidiary editions, and impressions of their historical sources, and that these various parts require sustained bibliographic analysis and description. To adequately theorize any research conducted in large-scale text archives—including r…[Read more]

A contribution to Transition’s “I Can’t Breathe” forum, an online space for responses to the murders of unarmed black Americans by police. My piece, which was chosen for publication in the print edition of the magazine, reflected upon the similarities between the death of Eric Garner in New York City and the death of an enslaved sugar refiner nam…[Read more]

This Theory Palette revision layers in 12 theoretical approaches; it also problematizes the perceiving-subject through a stylized human palette. The thought and speech bubbles gesture toward the problems of apperception and expression after René Magritte’s “Le fils de l’homme” (The Son of Man 1928-29) and “La Trahison des Images” (The Treachery…[Read more]

This article explores how librarians have responded to publishers’ control
over book prices in two different, yet related, historical periods. It historicizes the net price
system, a book-price control system in the early twentieth century, within debates by librarians
about library book buying and price negotiation practices. Turning to s…[Read more]

Excerpt: Concordance B from L. Ringer, ‘A Select Concordance of Some 400 Middle English Texts: A Study of Wycliffite Discourse with Particular Discussion of the Issues of Contemporary Poverty, Pious Practice, Substantive Law, and Anticlerical Style’ (unpub. Ph.D. thesis, University of Hull, 2007, Supervisor: Veronica O’Mara).

Excerpt: Concordance A from L. Ringer, ‘A Select Concordance of Some 400 Middle English Texts: A Study of Wycliffite Discourse with Particular Discussion of the Issues of Contemporary Poverty, Pious Practice, Substantive Law, and Anticlerical Style’ (unpub. Ph.D. thesis, University of Hull, 2007, Supervisor: Veronica O’Mara).

New scholarly books in religious studies defy easy labels and reflect the eagerness of publishers to widen academic discourse and to upset conventional wisdom in the name of new knowledge—in science, across genders, between faiths, and around the world.

List of Texts for A Select Concordance of Some 400 Middle English Texts: A Study of Wycliffite Discourse with Particular Discussion of the Issues of Contemporary Poverty, Pious Practice, Substantive Law, and Anticlerical Style’ (unpub. Ph.D. thesis, University of Hull, 2007).

This essay is part of a collection of open access articles on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The articles are written for first-time readers of Chaucer and are designed to supplement the teaching of the Canterbury Tales, particularly in university classrooms.

My contribution is focused on the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, providing an…[Read more]

This essay is part of a collection of open access articles on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The articles are written for first-time readers of Chaucer and are designed to supplement the teaching of the Canterbury Tales, particularly in university classrooms.

My contribution is focused on the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, providing an…[Read more]

List of Variants and Occurrences for A Select Concordance of Some 400 Middle English Texts: A Study of Wycliffite Discourse with Particular Discussion of the Issues of Contemporary Poverty, Pious Practice, Substantive Law, and Anticlerical Style’ (unpub. Ph.D. thesis, University of Hull, 2007).