Literary & textual criticism; early English in the world; codicology
The Review of English Studies has just published my latest article, ‘Verse-Craft, Editing, and the Work: Shadows of Orfeo‘. In it, I explore what potential the concept of the work has to help us in understanding early English material which exists in multiple witnesses, using Orfeo as my example and attention to the craft of verse as my method.
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I don’t normally find myself writing about Thom Gunn’s poetry. But I like Gunn, and while reading The Man with Night Sweats earlier this year I stumbled on a passage in ‘Lament’ which sounded insistently like the end of Pearl.
Could this be an allusion, or was my mind merely seeing Pearl everywhere? I tweeted, and friends agreed that there might be a there there. Looking more closely, I realised that ‘Lament’ displays some formal resemblances to Pearl too. It was time to write a note.
Leave a CommentWe’ve not had a good couple of years for conferences, to put it lightly. I’m happy to report that I’ll be giving a paper at…
Leave a CommentThe Chaucer Review has published my latest article, ‘Form, Time, and the “First English Sonnet”‘. You can find it on JSTOR or on Project Muse,…
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I have, as a side project, drafted a teaching book: a guide for students to help with the close reading of Middle English and Older Scots poetry. It is provisionally called How to Read Middle English and Older Scots Poetry.
Leave a CommentThe 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…
Leave a CommentThe 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:
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