Overview
I teach and write about a range of time-bound, but (I think) widely implicated features and transformations of medieval and early- early-modern literature and culture in England, c. 800-1600: book history; ethical norms and their literary and social expressions; Latin culture facing vernacular (English and French) transformations; economic modes before capitalism and their literary and historiographical resonances; reception of classical literature; women in literary, religious, and ritual contexts; medieval literary theory. Special focuses on Piers Plowman, Chaucer, John Gower, historical writing, forms of “lyric,” and fifteenth-century literature. Recent and in-progress essays on medieval economic theory and the place of poverty; Gower’s uses of classical literature; the reception of Gower in the seventeenth century; theory of the fourteenth-century lyric; clothing and fashion in Piers Plowman; the first specified payment for an English poem. Winner of the 2023 John Hurt Fisher Award for “significant contribution to the field of Gower Studies.”
Research Focus
- Medieval English poetry and its contexts (especially 13th through 15th centuries)
- Medieval Latin literature
- Audiences and contexts for medieval poetry
- Textual criticism and the literary and cultural contexts of books
- Medieval historical writing
- Multilingualism in medieval literature and culture
- 19th century American literature