A half-erased woman’s name is partially legible at the bottom of folio 41 verso of the Anglo-Saxon manuscript we now call the Vercelli Book. Edith – eadgiþ – provides mystery as highly unusual marginalia, an individual name added to and then erased from the manuscript. I argue here that the erased name eadgiþ is direct reference to St. Edith o…[Read more]

The figure of Hrothgar, aging king of the Danes, forces an analysis of the relationships among age, maleness, and masculinity in Beowulf. Masculine characters, while enacting the poem’s complex reciprocities and social transactions in the hall and on the battlefield, accrue status and power through assertions of control and dominance, through…[Read more]

The performances of Christ in the text of The Dream of the Rood construct a masculinity for Christ that is majestic, martial, and specifically heterosexual and that relies on a fragile opposition with a femininity defined as dominated Other in the figure of the Cross. His particularly constructed masculinity, explored rather than merely assumed or…[Read more]

Traditional equation of women with the feminine and men with the masculine is disrupted when Beowulf is read within the rubric of gender performance as determined by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter. Performativity enables a new way of interpreting the characters of Beowulf; specifically, in the world of the poem masculinity…[Read more]

Throughout the Christian era, literary and artistic representations of the Virgin Mary have been manipulated by a variety of ideologies, religious or political, to define the appropriate positioning and agency of the feminine in a culture. The culture of Anglo-Saxon England, like most others, almost always presented Mary in positive terms,…[Read more]

Like most female characters in Old English poetry, Judith from the Old English poem of the same name has been subject to much scrutiny in recent years. She has been read as a figure of Mother Church, or as a Germanic warrior, or as a warning against rape. Yet Judith’s relationship with her maid, the focus of my analysis of Judith, has been elided;…[Read more]

Feminist and gender scholars working in Anglo-Saxon studies in the past ten years have been asking new and important questions of a variety of Old English and Anglo-Latin texts. Most crucially, this interdisciplinary new work redefines the historiographical paradigms of Anglo-Saxon cultural production and reception so that women must now be…[Read more]

The New Handbook of Syriac Literature (NHSL) is a born-digital TEI-encoded reference work for the study of Syriac literature. The first volume, Bibliotheca Hagiographica Syriaca Electronica, was published by Syriaca.org in 2016 using a simple TEI schema to describe a single genre (hagiography) (Saint-Laurent et al. 2016; see also Saint-Laurent…[Read more]

Final proofs of an article that appeared in Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 125 (2013). The only real mistake in this proof is that the captions of two images have been inadvertently swapped (p.165 and 170).

Final proofs of my contribution to Settimane 61 (Spoleto, 2014).

This is the final proof of a chapter in Rob Meens, Dorine van Espelo, Bram van den Hoven van Genderen, Janneke Raaijmakers, Irene van Renswoude and Carine van Rhijn eds., Religious Franks. Religion and power in the Frankish kingdoms. Studies in honour of Mayke de Jong (Manchester 2016).

The text known to modern historians as Vita altera Bonifatii – the ‘second’ or ‘other’ Life of Boniface – is a very different text than the far better known Vita Bonifatii composed by Willibald in the decade after Boniface’s death. This paper presents some preliminary thoughts on the anonymous author’s purpose in writing the Life by placing the t…[Read more]

This paper provides an analysis of the attitude towards non-Franks in the late Merovingian period, distinguishing between the ethnic community of the Franks and the political community of the regnum Francorum, which were conceived of existing side by side. The paper attempts to show that, unlike in the early Carolingian period, ethnic labels were…[Read more]

In this paper I examine three pieces of early ninth-century Frisian hagiography: Liudger’s Vita Gregorii abbatis Traiectensis, Altfrid’s Vita Liudgeri and the anonymous Vita altera Bonifatii. Between them, these texts commemorate three generations of missionaries who left a lasting impact on Frisia. This commemoration was vital for cementing the…[Read more]

Of all the antagonists to feature in the eighth- and ninth-century sources, Radbod of Frisia isone of the most prominent, featuring heavily in both historical and hagiographical texts.Because of his prominence, though, there was no fixed vision of Radbod, and he could be different things to different authors working at different times.…[Read more]

La literatura ha estado desde siempre asociada al poder, y en la Edad Media oriental esto no es una excepción. Cuando Abu’l-Qāsem Ferdowsī terminó su gran obra, el Šāh-nāmeh, en 1010, esta se transformó en un elemento legitimador de las dinastías que durante los siglos medievales pugnarían por el dominio de Persia. A través de sus versos y de…[Read more]

Review of Celia Chazelle, Simon Doubleday, Felice Lifshitz and Amy G. Remensnyder, eds., Why the Middle Ages Matter: Medieval Light on Modern Injustice New York: Routledge, 2012

O presente estudo centra-se em dois capítulos específicos da Crónica de Portugal de 1419, dedicados às proezas de D. FuasRoupinho. Procedi a um exame aprofundado das narrativas que ele protagoniza na dita crónica, tendo como objectivo uma melhor compreensão da funcionalidade que esses relatos incorporam, quando enquadrados nos propósitos políti…[Read more]

A brief survey of chronicle-composition activity in medieval Portugal.