In his prologue to the late fourteenth-century romance, the Destruction of Troy, John
Clerk of Whalley negotiates between his roles as translator, historian and alliterative
poet to introduce his account of the fall of Troy for medieval English readers.
Professing to tell the true story of Britain’s ancient ancestors, he invokes the f…[Read more]

In the next seven minutes, I would like to convince you that real formalism and real historicism really are, or really should be, one and the same critical practice. Our idea of what counts as knowledge about early English literature will be enriched by integrating formalist and historicist methods. Those of us who work on prosody and poetics are…[Read more]

Quantity matters in the meter of Beowulf and other early English poems. It matters in the form of a metrical principle known as resolution. Metrical resolution served alliterative poets as a way of counting; it can serve modern scholars as evidence for the cultural meanings of verse craft. This paper therefore has two sections: How it Works and…[Read more]

Review of Maravillas, peregrinaciones y utopías: literatura de viajes en el mundo románico. Ed. Rafael Beltrán. Valencia: Universitat de Valencia, 2002. Originally published in Bulletin of Spanish Studies 80.6 (2003): 743-44.

Review of Mocedades de Rodrigo. Ed. Leonardo Funes, with Felipe Tenenbaum. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Tamesis. 2004. Originally published in Bulletin of Spanish Studies 83.8 (2006): 982-83.

Review of Barletta, Vincent. Covert Gestures: Crypto-Islamic Literature as Cultural Practice in Early Modern Spain. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Originally published in Hispania 89.1 (2006): 50-52.

Review of Young, Douglas C. Rogues and Genres: Generic Transformation in the Spanish Picaresque and Arabic Maqāma. Newark: Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta, 2004. Originally published in Aljamía 19 (529-531).

Review of Díaz-Mas, Paloma. Sephardim: The Jews from Spain. Ed. and trans. George K. Zucker. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Originally published in Bulletin of the Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies 33.1 (33-34).

Review of Szpiech, Ryan. Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic (Middle Ages Series). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Orignially published in Speculum 88.3 (853-855).

Review of Hook, David, ed. The Arthur of the Iberians: The Arthurian Legends in the Spanish and Portuguese Worlds. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015. Orignally published in Arthuriana 26.4 (2016): 78-81.

Through the comparative study of non-Anglophone translations of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, we can achieve the progressive goals of Emily Apter’s “translational transnationalism” and Edward Said’s “cosmopolitan humanism.” Both translation and humanism were intrinsic to Chaucer’s initial composition of the Tales, and in turn, both shap…[Read more]

Round Table on Diversity and Teaching Medieval Studies sponsored by Graduate Student Council. Session title: “Tearing Down Walls, Building Bridges:
Medieval Diversity and Cross-Cultural Encounters in Syllabus Design and Teaching.” This paper is about two courses that illustrate the principle “Diversity in Every Course Title” and several…[Read more]

Lecture/class notes on Samuel Beckett’s Murphy. I’m sharing my teaching notes (rough) for works that may be helpful to others and are widely taught.

With thirty-seven named locations, the Digby Mary Magdalene is rightfully considered to require the most elaborate staging of the Middle English dramatic corpus. In this article, I re-examine the manuscript to find evidence of how the various locations in the play can be grouped into what I term staging complexes. Beginning with the division of…[Read more]

The extracodical stanzas of John Lydgate’s Testament and “Quis Dabit Meo Capiti Fontem Lacrimarum” in the Clopton chantry chapel of the Great Church of Holy Trinity, Long Melford, not only are two intriguing witnesses differing in presentation and language from the manuscript copies but also can be considered as part of a rhetorical program where…[Read more]