The Iberian Peninsula during the Latin Middle Ages was home to large populations of Muslims and Jews. During the period we like to call the Middle Ages, much of the Iberian Peninsula was under Muslim rule. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the entire peninsula was under Christian rule, and Judaism and Islam were officially banned.…[Read more]

IMC paper for panel 374 Medieval Futura 1: Now, sponsored by the Medieval Studies Institute, Indiana Univ.–Bloomington and organised by Dr Andrea Whitacre.

My essay interrogates the striking silences in Scott’s oeuvre in relation to Scotland’s involvement as a partner of the British Empire in the colonization of the Caribbean and in the exploitation of slavery in this region. By drawing from narratological theories (especially those articulated by Robyn R. Warhol and Ruth Rosaler), I treat Scott’s…[Read more]

A description of how I employ video games and RPGs, especially open-world online games, to harness student curiosity and foster an interest in research-based assignments in literature and humanities courses. Talk was presented to a K-16 audience with emphasis on K-12 teaching, but assignments work well at 9-12 and undergraduate university levels.

This volume contributes to the study of early English poetics. In these essays, several related approaches and fields of study radiate outward from poetics, including stylistics, literary history, word studies, gender studies, metrics, and textual criticism. By combining and redirecting these traditional scholarly methods, as well as exploring…[Read more]

Exemplaria review essay by Sarah Elliott Novacich of recent books by Simon Gaunt, Jonathan Hsy, and Shirin Khanmohamadi on medieval contact zones.

“Notre-Dame in Jean Fouquet’s Hours of Etienne Chevalier, ca. 1452-52” is a book excerpt of May Spangler’s “Paris in Architecture, Literature and Art,” recently published at Peter Lang. Designed for an interdisciplinary course in Cultural Studies, the book capitalizes on the little exposure liberal arts students have to architecture, and the wid…[Read more]

A course (MA level) I taught at the University of Pittsburgh in 2001, the research for which culminated in my book Freedom Readers (Notre Dame 2011).

This paper links the medieval and early modern production of parchment and paper with modern electronics manufacturing, in order to examine some of the occluded ecological and political dimensions of archival study.

This article analyzes the politics of anachronism in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale. It argues that the Wife of Bath counters the Man of Law’s descending model of sovereignty and regulation of feminine agency with a powerful heroine who wields ascending sovereignty. The Old Wife lives in her Arthurian present and its English future simul…[Read more]

Late medieval culture tends to value pain highly and positively. Accordingly, much medievalist scholarship links pain with fear and emphasizes their usefulness in the period’s philosophy, literature, visual art, and drama. Yet, key moments in The York Play of the Crucifixion, The Second Shepherds’ Play, and The Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge tro…[Read more]

During the second South African War (1899–1902), also known as the Anglo-Boer War, the British
War Office supervised the transportation of approximately 24,000 South African prisoners of
war to Bermuda, St. Helena, and British India. Examining previously unstudied memoirs published
immediately following the war by war prisoners held in camps i…[Read more]