On 31 May 1310, a medieval author and a medieval book were sentenced to be burnt. The title of Bruce Holsinger’s 2014 novel might have been the judgment of a fourteenth-century inquisitor: not a political prophecy but a treatise that outraged the church, for William of Paris Le Mirouer des simples ames was indeed the […]
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In chapter 60 of The Book of Margery Kempe (c.1436-8), Margery is in Norwich when she meets a lady who wishes to take her for dinner. ‘As honest wolde , sche went to the cherch ther the lady herd hir servyse, wher this creatur sey a fayr ymage of owr Lady clepyd a “pyte”’ (285) […]
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From the four-hundred-year span of our Leverhulme-funded project, ‘Women’s Poetry in Ireland, Scotland and Wales’, more than two hundred Gaelic songs attributed to female poets have survived. The earliest of these, some of which are attributable to named poets from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, provide an intriguing glimpse of women’s lives in the Gàidhealtachd, […]
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In early September I attended the conference, ‘Medicine of Words: Literature, Medicine, and Theology in the Middle Ages’, held at St Anne’s College, Oxford. There I had a privilege to meet Professor Corinne Saunders, who gave a very exciting plenary lecture with her colleague, Dr Charles Fernyhough, a psychologist, as part of their Wellcome-funded […]
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We are delighted to announce that the Hearing the Voice project led by the University of Durham has been awarded a Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award to continue its interdisciplinary research into voice-hearing and auditory hallucinations for another five years. This is one of the first grants ever to be awarded under the Wellcome Trust’s new […]
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In the early eighteenth century John Dryden famously described Geoffrey Chaucer as ‘the Father of English Poetry’, although he wasn’t the first one to do so. Three centuries earlier in The Regiment of Princes the poet and bureaucrat Thomas Hoccleve offered the first recorded reference to Chaucer as literary father. This paternal image defines the […]
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