In order to further disentangle the reality and fiction of this view of culture versus barbarity and of reform versus wickedness, I shall analyse twelfth-century Irish vitae.
Irish Hagiographical Lives in the Twelfth Century: Church Reform before the Anglo-Norman Invasion
September 7, 2014 By
Writing conquest: traditions of Anglo-Saxon invasion and resistance in the twelfth century
March 2, 2014 By
Writing Conquest examines the ways in which Latin, Old English, and Middle English twelfth-century historical and pseudo-historical texts remembered and reconstructed three formative moments of Anglo-Saxon invasion and resistance…
Did King Alfred write anything?
January 7, 2014 By
The author investigates the question of whether King Alfred translated Latin texts into English. According to the author, modern scholarship seems to conclude that Alfred did compose the extant translations of a number of texts, although there are questions about Alfred’s linguistic and intellectual skills.
“A model of wisdom and exemplar of modesty without parallel in our time”: how Matilda of Flanders was represented in two twelfth-century histories
June 7, 2013 By
My thesis investigates the different ways in which two twelfth-century historians, William of Malmesbury and Orderic Vitalis, represented Matilda.
Organa doctorum: Gerbert of Aurillac, organbuilder?
October 11, 2012 By
He was born a peasant. Yet, through intelligence, political skill and uncommon good luck he came to be one of the most influential people in the Europe of his time…Pope Sylvester II.
The Myth of the Anglo-Saxon Oral Poet
July 15, 2012 By
There are at least two reasons why the search for the Anglo-Saxon oral poet is worth reopening. To begin with, current thinking about oral poetry and poetics in the Anglo-Saxon period has been indelibly stamped by the classic Parry/Lord thesis, well known in its evolution from the 1950s to more recent years,
That country beyond the Humber”: the English North, regionalism, and the negotiation of nation in medieval English literature
December 28, 2011 By
The English North is “Not London” but is “before Scotland,” a strangely liminal space between the familiar
South and those undesirables north of the River Tweed.
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