An article that contrasts the role of gift giving in Old English poems like Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

This short essay explores Susan Einbinder’s observation that the poetics of the medieval Anglo-Jewish poet Meir of Norwich show a unique mix of borrowing from
the poetic schools of both Ashkenaz and Sepharad. Boyarin argues that Meir was discursively creating a school of Anglo-Hebrew poetics, one that he imagined drew from both of these e…[Read more]

Looks at the Hebrew reception of the Secret of Secrets

This article looks at the way the author of the medieval Toldot Ben Sira engages with canonical literary models such as the Bible and Rabbinic midrash.

Drimmer, “Unnoticed and Unusual: An Illustration in a Manuscript of John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes,” Journal of the Early Book Society 20 (2017): 209-18.

Drimmer, “The Disorder of Operations: Illuminators, Scribes, and John Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” LIAS 44 (2017): 5-28.

This essay argues that late medieval manuscript producers were both aware of and at times troubled by the ontological ambiguity of the medium in which they worked. Nelson Goodman’s aesthetic philosophy provides an apt framework for characterizing this ambiguity, which rests on the manuscript’s dual status as both an allograph and an autograph. Emb…[Read more]

Drimmer, “The Painters of Late Medieval London and Westminster,” Burlington Magazine CLIX (2017): 445-49.

This article examines a manuscript in the British Library that offers one of the earliest known illustrated dictionaries of Egyptian (pseudo)hieroglyphs produced in Early Modern Europe. The c.1507 book was based on a manuscript that purports to define Egyptian hieroglyphs and which was found on a Greek Island. It was translated and written by an…[Read more]

This article proposes that the responsibility for literary failure in a manuscript culture could lie with the manuscript itself. During the later Middle Ages, writers’ acts of composition and presentation established goals by which a form of non-commercial success may be measured, and traces of manuscript owners’ activities in books index the ach…[Read more]

Drimmer, “Questionable Contexts: A Pedigree Book and Queen Elizabeth’s Teeth,” in Scholars and Poets Talk about Queens, ed. Carole Levin and Christine Stewart-Nuñez (New York: Palgrave, 2015), 203-224.