This note calls attention to a precursor of the Latin text of Durham Proverb 7 in the ninth-century Collectanea Pseudo-Bedae and, in doing so, sheds some light on the unresolved relationship between the Old English and Latin versions of the Durham Proverbs in general and Durham Proverb 7 in particular.

This note established that an Old English confessional prayer in BL Vespasian D.xx is a close analogue to the Latin text in the Book of Cerne (Cambridge University Library MS L1.1.10). These two text and two other Old English prayers in BL MS Tiberius C.i and the Old English Handbook for the Use of a Confessor may have sprung from a common, Latin…[Read more]

This note established that an Old English confessional prayer in BL Vespasian D.xx is a close analogue to the Latin text in the Book of Cerne (Cambridge University Library MS L1.1.10). These two text and two other Old English prayers in BL MS Tiberius C.i and the Old English Handbook for the Use of a Confessor may have sprung from a common, Latin…[Read more]

In this chapter, I discuss the use of Anglo-Saxon literature and culture in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

This is the accepted manuscript version of my review of the edited volume Golden Middle Ages in Europe for Early Medieval Europe journal. Some wording may differ from the final published version. Please refer to the journal website.

Although there were many handwritten, often informal catalogues of Sir Robert Cotton’s manuscripts and books during his lifetime and in the years afterwards, the desire for an official printed catalogue which could be circulated in the public realm did not really bear fruit until the late 1600s. And when two versions finally did appear — the…[Read more]

This essay is an attempt to think about melancholy as a shared creative endeavor, as a trans-corporeal blue (and blues) ecology that would bind humans, nonhumans, and stormy weather together in what Tim Ingold has called a meshwork. In this enmeshment of the “strange strangers” of Timothy Morton’s dark ecology, “[t]he only way out is down” a…[Read more]

This special issue of the “Journal of Narrative Theory” represents one of the BABEL Working Group’s first forays into a collaborative and “baggy” humanistic scholarship between medieval studies, more contemporary humanistic studies, and the sciences, with the objective of interrogating together the open terms, “human,” “humanity,” “humanism,”…[Read more]

This essay considers Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of hospitality in relation to the “isolated and heroic being that the state produces by its virile virtues,” through an analysis of female Chechen suicide terrorists in contemporary Russia and the figure of Grendel in the Old English poem “Beowulf,” in order to raise some questions about the relat…[Read more]

In a talk he gave in 1995 at a conference at Georgetown University, “Cultural Frictions: Medieval Cultural Studies in Post-Modern Contexts,” Paul Strohm asserted that “postmodernism is preoccupied with history, endlessly obsessed with history, and with the nature of the claims the past exerts upon us; it might almost be called a way of thinking…[Read more]

The essays collected in this volume demonstrate that, when certain medieval and contemporary cultural texts are placed alongside each other — such as a fourteenth-century penitential handbook and the reality television show “Survivor,” or early fifteenth-century Lancastrian statecraft (Henry IV) and the stagecraft of George W. Bush’s presidential…[Read more]

This essay offers a consideration of Levinas’s philosophy of hospitality in relation to the terroristic figure of Grendel in the Old English poem “Beowulf,” in order to raise some questions about the vexed connections between ethics, violence and sovereignty, as well as between ethics and politics, both in the early Middle Ages and in our own t…[Read more]

“Liquid Beowulf” serves as the Introduction to “The Postmodern Beowulf: A Critical Casebook” (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2006), and makes an argument for the Old English poem as a richly inter- and cross-temporal cultural response to historical traumas that still haunt our present moment and which also poses always important (and…[Read more]

The essays, manifestos, rants, screeds, pleas, soliloquies, telegrams, broadsides, eulogies, songs, harangues, confessions, laments, and acts of poetic terrorism in these two volumes — which collectively form an academic “rave” — were culled, with some later additions, from roundtable sessions at the International Congress on Medieval Studies…[Read more]

The work of L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, especially her psychoanalytic criticism of Chaucer, and her formulations of discontinuist historical approaches to the Middle Ages, has been extremely influential within medieval studies for several decades. More recently she has been focusing on more broad defenses of the humanities, especially with regard to…[Read more]

This is the accepted manuscript version of my review of the edited volume Golden Middle Ages in Europe for History journal. Some wording may differ from the final published version. Please refer to the journal website.

The aim of this contribution is to review some of the major areas of current research on the Arabic Bible, along with the factors and trends contributing to them. Also we present some of the tools that are currently under development in the Biblia Arabica team, Munich.

We provide here a very condensed survey of the transmission of traditions,…[Read more]

This is a book review (pre-print) of the 2013 CIPL edited volume on scriptoria.

This is a book review (pre-print) of the 2014 book by Lifshitz.