My fiction is the natural outgrowth of a fascination with medieval history and culture, my itch to explore what it might have been like to live in those times. To this end, I write my novels in the third person subjective point-of-view, which means that I present the narrative from within the minds of several […]
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In summer 2015, I was a participant in a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar on Manuscript Materiality. As seminar participants, we experienced first-hand the laborious and delicate work required of medieval scribes to produce the written word. While experimenting with techniques for making parchment, scraping quills, preparing ink, crafting paper, and assembling a […]
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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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