Hello! I’m Daniel Sawyer, currently a Departmental Lecturer in English Literature and Manuscript Studies in Oxford’s English Faculty, and an Associate Research Fellow at St Hilda’s College, Oxford.
I’m fascinated by questions about how and why texts work, and about their sometimes-awkward ties to their material and social contexts. I investigate these questions using close reading alongside other bodies of expertise, chiefly codicology (the systematic, part-quantitative study of physical manuscripts) and textual criticism (the study of the transmission of texts and the practice of editing them).
I’m currently writing a book that draws together new work in poetics and wider global perspectives to consider the sixteenth century’s inheritance of Middle English poetry. I’ve written the first complete student guide to Middle English and early Scots verse-craft (2024) and the first book-length history of reading for later Middle English verse (2020).
I have longer-term work underway to investigate manuscripts from the period which do not survive. I’m involved in an edition-in-progress of the Wycliffite Bible, the first full translation of the Bible into English, and I’m also editing two of the Canterbury Tales. I’ve published on topics such as the earliest English sonnet (1448/9), the lost manuscripts of medieval England, the use of Middle English by the twentieth-century poet Thom Gunn, and rediscovered manuscript fragments.
In teaching I specialise in palaeography, codicology, textual criticism, and English literature from the earliest surviving English up to the seventeenth century. I’ve also taught across a wide range of other writings, from Gildas’s De excidio et conquestu Britanniae to twenty-first-century political speeches.
On this site you can find details of my research and my career, and my blog, which primarily notes new publications.
Contact Details
Email: daniel [dot] sawyer [at-sign] ell.ox.ac.uk
Twitter: @DE_Sawyer
Academia.edu: Daniel Sawyer
Address: Faculty of English Language and Literature, St Cross Building, Manor Road, Oxford, OX1 3UL