What would English literary history look like if the unit of measure were not the political reign but the poetic tradition? The earliest poems in English were written in alliterative verse, the meter of Beowulf. Alliterative meter preceded tetrameter, which first appeared in the twelfth century, and tetrameter in turn preceded pentameter, the…[Read more]

A description of how I employ video games and RPGs, especially open-world online games, to harness student curiosity and foster an interest in research-based assignments in literature and humanities courses. Talk was presented to a K-16 audience with emphasis on K-12 teaching, but assignments work well at 9-12 and undergraduate university levels.

This volume contributes to the study of early English poetics. In these essays, several related approaches and fields of study radiate outward from poetics, including stylistics, literary history, word studies, gender studies, metrics, and textual criticism. By combining and redirecting these traditional scholarly methods, as well as exploring…[Read more]

This article analyzes the politics of anachronism in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale. It argues that the Wife of Bath counters the Man of Law’s descending model of sovereignty and regulation of feminine agency with a powerful heroine who wields ascending sovereignty. The Old Wife lives in her Arthurian present and its English future simul…[Read more]

Late medieval culture tends to value pain highly and positively. Accordingly, much medievalist scholarship links pain with fear and emphasizes their usefulness in the period’s philosophy, literature, visual art, and drama. Yet, key moments in The York Play of the Crucifixion, The Second Shepherds’ Play, and The Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge tro…[Read more]

One of a number of leaves in the manuscript to have been badly damaged in the sixteenth century, folio 89 of the Glastonbury Miscellany reminds its modern readers of the fragmentary nature of the medieval textual record. Work began on this paper manuscript in the middle of the fifteenth century at Glastonbury Abbey. Transported to London in the…[Read more]

Seminar paper for ‘Translating the Nonhuman’, organised by Liam Lewis (University of Warwick) and Haylie Swenson (The George Washington University)

Seminar Abstract — This seminar invites participants to consider the connections created by translations of the nonhuman into human languages. To what extent is language the domain of the human,…[Read more]

A two-page abstract of the book.

From the twelfth century to the seventeenth, political prophecy was prominent among English literary genres no less than in English political life. Derived from Welsh poetic tradition via Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin History of the Kings of Britain, prophecy reached all social classes. Prophetic texts influenced the decisions of kings, shaped p…[Read more]

Excerpt: Concordance B from L. Ringer, ‘A Select Concordance of Some 400 Middle English Texts: A Study of Wycliffite Discourse with Particular Discussion of the Issues of Contemporary Poverty, Pious Practice, Substantive Law, and Anticlerical Style’ (unpub. Ph.D. thesis, University of Hull, 2007, Supervisor: Veronica O’Mara).