Books
How to Read Middle English Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024); get 30% off either the paperback or the hardback if you order direct through OUP with the code AAFLYG6
Daniel Sawyer’s rigorous and instructive new book seeks to turn reading Middle English and Scots poetry into a learnable “craft” … a hugely useful set of appendices and glossaries … How to Read Middle English Poetry is accessible and welcoming, emphasizing throughout that we are all always learning how to read.
— TLS
This is an excellent, comprehensive, and warmly approachable guide to the reading of Middle English poetry. I will recommend it to all my students, and would extend that recommendation to anyone interested in the poetry of any period.
— English
Reading English Verse in Manuscript c.1350–c.1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020)
It is remarkable that a monograph on such a fundamental issue had not been written before now. Students of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English literature are fortunate that it was Daniel Sawyer who wrote it.
a very learned book on manuscript verse texts, wide‐ranging in scope and detailed in analysis, as one would expect from this very promising young scholar of medieval English manuscripts.
Crisp and efficient, Sawyer’s monograph ushers the reader through meticulous codicological discussions with engaging readability.
Chapters and articles
‘The Counter-Arthurian Piracy of Jack Spicer’s Holy Grail’, postmedieval (accepted, forthcoming 2025)
(with Megan Faith Oldfield) ‘“He that no good can”, Again: Three Further Unrecorded Copies of a Middle English Proverb’, Notes and Queries (accepted, forthcoming 2025)
‘Rime’, Medieval Perspectives (accepted, forthcoming 2024)
‘Reading Envisioned in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, in Books, Readers and Libraries in Fiction, ed. Karen Attar and Andrew Nash (London: University of London Press, 2024), 19–40
‘Writing a Teaching Book’, New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession 5.1 (2024), doi:10.5070/NC35061994
‘Manuscript Canonicity’, Textual Practice 38 (2024), 235–256, doi:10.1080/0950236X.2024.2317004
‘What Tongue Does Chaucer’s Custance Speak? “Latyn corrupt” Revisited’, Medium Ævum 92 (2023), 283–296
‘Verse-Craft, Editing, and the Work: Shadows of Orfeo’, Review of English Studies 73.309 (2022), 219–38, doi:10.1093/res/hgab058
(with Mike Kestemont and others) ‘Forgotten Books: The Application of Unseen Species Models to the Survival of Culture’, Science 375.6582 (2022), 765–9, doi:10.1126/science.abl7655; see also Forgotten Books website and author explanation video:
‘The Influence of Pearl on Thom Gunn’s “Lament”’, Notes and Queries 68.3 (2021), 363–66, doi:10.1093/notesj/gjab133
‘Form, Time, and the “First English Sonnet”’, Chaucer Review, 56.3 (2021), 193–224, doi:10.5325/chaucerrev.56.3.0193
‘Pedant’s Revolt: Dissent in the Hierarchy of Scripts’, Journal of the Early Book Society, 22 (2019), 269–80
‘Missing Books in the Folk Codicology of Later Medieval England’, The Mediaeval Journal, 7.2 (2019 for 2017), 103–32, doi:10.1484/J.TMJ.5.117366
‘Page Numbers, Signatures and Catchwords’, in Book Parts, ed. by Dennis Duncan and Adam Smyth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 138–49
‘Rediscovered Manuscript Fragments of The Prick of Conscience in the Library of Queens’ College, Cambridge’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 15.5 (2016), 515–40
‘“He that no good can”: An Unrecorded Copy of a Middle English Proverb’, Notes and Queries, 63.1 (2016), 15–17, doi:10.1093/notesj/gjv252
‘Navigation by Tab and Thread: Place-Markers and Readers’ Movements in Books’, in Spaces for Reading in Later Medieval England, ed. by Mary C. Flannery and Carrie Griffin (London: Palgrave, 2016), 99–114, doi:10.1057/9781137428622_7
Editions
(with Elizabeth Solopova and Anne Hudson) Wycliffite Bible: Digital Edition (2019; project continuing)
The Cook’s Prologue and Tale and the Man of Law’s Prologue and Tale, in The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. by Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in progress)
Reviews
I have reviewed books, or am currently reviewing books, for Speculum, The Library, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, The English Historical Review, The Review of English Studies, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, the Journal of the Early Book Society and Arthuriana. I have also been also a contributor to The Year’s Work in English Studies, covering Middle English textual and manuscript studies for three years.
I welcome review requests from editors and consider them all carefully, though I cannot guarantee that I will take them all on!
Reference works and invited blog posts
‘Book History’, in The Chaucer Encyclopedia (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2023), 236–7
‘Against Dullness’, The Conveyer: Research in Special Collections at the Bodleian Libraries
‘Textuality in Transition: Editing Texts from Medieval Britain’, Quadrivium
‘The Medieval List’, Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities
My ORCID iD is https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4584-236X.