This paper interrogates the connection between entities that hover in the liminal state between life and death (such as vampires and spirits) and the manner in which these entities relate to Alaya Dawn Johnson’s conjurings of alternate political structures and hierarchies in her Spirit Binders series. Johnson’s alternate hierarchies are com…[Read more]

This conference aims to bring together researchers applying network analysis to pre-modern manuscripts and manuscript texts. Key topics include:

• Theoretical reflections on the challenges and advantages of applying network analysis, including social network analysis, to pre-modern written cultures;
• Application of network analysis to cor…[Read more]

Liste der Neuerscheinungen zur deutschsprachigen historischen Wissens- und Gebrauchsliteratur 2019.

The primary goal of this dissertation is to produce a rigorous methodology for distinguishing between the contrapunctus structure and its elaboration in performing structural analysis of fourteenth-century diminished counterpoint. This methodology is based on historical thought by carefully analyzing contemporaneous treatises and their musical…[Read more]

The Berliner Repertorium (http://opus.ub.hu-berlin.de/repertorium/page/home), online since June 2017, provides a database of Middle High and Low German translations of Latin hymns, sequences, and antiphons until the year 1600. In this contribution on our database of hymn translations, the ‘Berliner Repertorium’, I will introduce you to its str…[Read more]

The Berliner Repertorium (http://opus.ub.hu-berlin.de/repertorium/page/home), online since June 2017, provides a database of Middle High and Low German translations of Latin hymns, sequences, and antiphons until the year 1600. In this contribution on our database of hymn translations, the ‘Berliner Repertorium’, I will introduce you to its str…[Read more]

Anglo-Scandinavian literary and legal texts give evidence of two cultures which shared similar attitudes to punitive acts of violence; whether as literary trope or legislative recourse, deliberate mutilation was a familiar form of retribution. Why this is the case is not always clear within the context of the texts in which such episodes are…[Read more]

The term ’empire’ is frequently applied retrospectively by historians to historical trans-cultural political entities that are notable either for their geographic breadth, unprecedented expansionary ambitions, or extensive political hegemony. Yet the use of the terminology of empire in historical studies is often ill-defined, as exemplified by the…[Read more]

Gesta regum Anglorum, written by William of Malmesbury in the twelfth century, is a key source for the life of the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon king, Æthelstan (924–939). Contemporary narrative histories provide little detail relating to Æthelstan’s kingship, and the account of Gesta regum Anglorum purports to grant an unparalleled insight into his l…[Read more]

The practical necessity of sight to effective participation in Anglo-Saxon life is reflected in the multifaceted depictions of punitive blinding in late Anglo-Saxon literature. As a motif of empowerment or disempowerment, acts of blinding permeate the histories and hagiographies of the eleventh and twelfth centuries and each narrative mode…[Read more]

In 1016 the young Danish prince who was to become Cnut the Great, King of England, Denmark, and Norway, laid siege to the city of London as part of a program of conquest that would see him crowned as King of England by 1017. This millennial year is an appropriate time to reflect on the consequences of London’s defiance as a city that was rapidly…[Read more]

In this essay, I examine two widely divergent instances of what I understand to be a compulsive and racialized-sexualized violence against women whose bodies have been figured as “foreign”/Eastern (and even, as animal and barbaric) threats within collective national bodies: the real case of a massacre in the modern state of Gujarat in southwestern…[Read more]

Review of Ellen D. Haskell, Mystical Resistance: Uncovering the Zohar’s Conversations with Christianity (Oxford UP 2016), originally published in Speculum 94.4 (2019), 1167–1168.

Presentation of a 15th century book-binding with a trick-lock from Munich.

En la más reciente edición y estudio de la Carajicomedia, su editor llama la atención sobre un aspecto determinado de esta obra, y por extensión, a todas las sátiras a mitad de camino entre lo burlesco y lo erótico: se establece la necesidad de explorar «more fully the political complexity of the period; the reasons that its authors may have h…[Read more]

“The Other Close at Hand: Gerald of Wales and the ‘Marvels of the West,’” in The Monstrous Middle Ages, eds. Robert Mills and Bettina Bildhauer (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), 97-112

“Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript,” with Susan Kim, in Dark Reflections, Monstrous Reflections: Essays on the Monster in Culture, ed. Sorcha Ní Fhlainn (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press E-Book, 2008)