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Category: publication

Pearl and Thom Gunn’s ‘Lament’

Published 22 September 2021 by Daniel Sawyer

Pearl ll. 1165–70, as they appear in the sole surviving copy: London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x, f. 55r.
Pearl ll. 1165–70, as they appear in the sole surviving copy: London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x, f. 55r.

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.

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Published: Reading English Verse in Manuscript

Published 27 May 2020 by Daniel Sawyer

My book, and a facsimile of Bodleian MS Fairfax 16

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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Book Parts and the Feed

Published 31 May 2019 by Daniel Sawyer

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 185, f. 32v, catchword: ‘his broder‘

I have a new publication out: a chapter in Book Parts, edited by Dennis Duncan and Adam Smyth. The collection as a whole considers the histories and uses of all the different components which go to make up a book. While the individual chapters draw on their authors’ research, they’re also relatively accessible, so as to serve undergraduates, new graduate students, and anyone else taking their first steps in book history.

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First Fruits

Published 7 March 2018 by Daniel Sawyer

The ‘Towards a New Edition of the Wycliffite Bible’ project which employs me recently put up a public prototype version of the project’s digital result: an open-access online edition of both versions of the Wycliffite Bible, designed to be expanded collaboratively in years to come. I gave a very quick paper introducing the project at Oxford’s interdisciplinary Medieval Studies meeting this week, and this seemed like a good moment to put up a new post contextualizing the project here.

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IMEV, SIMEV, NIMEV and DIMEV

Published 16 April 2016 by Daniel Sawyer

I recently published a note. The specific new discovery that it reports is not going to rejig the landscape of scholarship. By remarking on the previusly unrecorded appearance of a rhyming proverb in Bodleian Library MS Digby 99 the note alters our understanding of the textual and geographical affiliations of Balliol College, MS 354 (available online here), the so-called ‘commonplace book’ of Richard Hill.

But I make a broader point in my conclusion. In work on Middle English verse we rely on a set of indexes to keep track of what is what and where:

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