The second review of Reading English Verse in Manuscript has arrived, from Oliver Pickering in the Journal of the Early Book Society (volume 23, 265–8; not…
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The first review of my book has emerged, written by Eric Weiskott for the Review of English Studies, and I’m happy to say it’s very…
One CommentMichael Johnston (at Purdue) has been in touch to let me know that the provenance information for a manuscript in the massive online resource Medieval…
Leave a CommentOUP have now put out the electronic form of my book, with its own DOI: you can find it here. My impression is that academics…
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My new book was published this month. Reading English Verse in Manuscript c.1350–c.1500 can be ordered from OUP here, and, in the UK, at the time of writing, Blackwell’s are selling it for about £5 less.
This is in a sense ‘the book of the doctorate’, but it’s changed a great deal since I received my DPhil. The book is shorter, clearer and punchier. It draws on a significantly larger mass of evidence and corrects various errors and fuzzinesses in the doctoral work. And none of it has been published elsewhere: this is not a monograph whose most exciting chapter can be found as an earlier article.
Here is the blurb:
Leave a CommentLast month I gave a ten-minute flash talk for the general public as part of Oxford’s contribution to the UK’s national ‘Being Human’ festival of…
Leave a CommentI have a new article out, and a pretty weighty one too: at c.12,000 words, drawing on evidence of 1,511 (probably) lost medieval books gleaned…
Leave a CommentAs it’s the time of year when new graduate students collide with old handwriting for the first time, I recently wrote a short Twitter thread…
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You can now hear me read the first chapter of the later Wycliffite translation of Song of Songs in (an approximation of) fourteenth-century London Middle English, here.
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Back in 2016 I had a chapter come out in the fine collection Spaces for Reading in Later Medieval England, edited by Mary Flannery and Carrie Griffin. So fine was the collection, in fact, that it was one of the most-downloaded books on Palgrave’s entire literature list (not just medieval literature!).
My chapter discussed how we might study the fixed physical bookmarks sometimes found in medieval manuscripts, turning them into evidence which might tell us something specific about reading. It was, to my knowledge, the first detailed exploration of the uses of these rather enigmatic markers.
I’m still pretty pleased with it, and especially with the distinction I suggest between bookmarks which reinforce textual structures and bookmarks which cut across those structures. But I’ve since had a further thought about this evidence, hence this blog post…
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