List of Variants and Occurrences for A Select Concordance of Some 400 Middle English Texts: A Study of Wycliffite Discourse with Particular Discussion of the Issues of Contemporary Poverty, Pious Practice, Substantive Law, and Anticlerical Style’ (unpub. Ph.D. thesis, University of Hull, 2007).

Headword List for A Select Concordance of Some 400 Middle English Texts: A Study of Wycliffite Discourse with Particular Discussion of the Issues of Contemporary Poverty, Pious Practice, Substantive Law, and Anticlerical Style’ (unpub. Ph.D. thesis, University of Hull, 2007).

An edition and translation of an unpublished essay by Jorge Luis Borges on the modern rediscovery of the Beowulf manuscript. Essay held at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas.

Literary scholars have traditionally understood landscapes, whether natural or manmade, as metaphors for humanity instead of concrete settings for people’s actions. This book accepts the natural world as such by investigating how Anglo-Saxons interacted with and conceived of their lived environments. Examining Old English poems such as Beowulf and…[Read more]

Literary scholars have traditionally understood landscapes, whether natural or manmade, as metaphors for humanity instead of concrete settings for people’s actions. This book accepts the natural world as such by investigating how Anglo-Saxons interacted with and conceived of their lived environments. Examining Old English poems such as Beowulf and…[Read more]

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]

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]

The preliminary materials in Shakespeare’s First Folio survive in a variety of sequences, and until Peter Blayney proposed bibliographical reasons for a correct order in the 1990s, scholars weren’t sure what order was intended by the publishers. These slides diagram Blayney’s order, the reasoning behind it, and some of the variant orders that can…[Read more]

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]

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]

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]

An entry in the Women Medievalists and the Academy collection, this brief biography presents Cambridge historian Mary Bateson, scholar and suffragist, who lived on the cusp of the opportunity for academic professionalization for women. Her life illustrates an inspiring blend of serious scholarship, accessible publication, and devoted political…[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]