Research

For a list of my publications, please see my University of Exeter profile page.

My specific area of interest is the weird and wonderful world of medieval Britain, with its rich and complicated linguistic ecology. In particular, I enjoy looking at the place of the French language in medieval Britain. Why would you write a guide to the calendar in French, when everyone would have understood English and when Latin was the established language for this sort of text? Why was the late Antique moralist Cato translated not once, not twice, but three times into French in England within a century? These questions don’t have simple answers, but they do have all sorts of resonances for how we understand the premodern world - and, by extension, our own.

MyPhD (also completed at Exeter) examined a range of what we might loosely call ‘didactic literature’ written in French, but in England, during the Middle Ages (c. 1100-1400), and is currently undergoing final revisions for publication at Boydell and Brewer.

I’m currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on Learning Anglo-French, a five-year research project that’s building a database of all known manuscripts that played a role in teaching the French language in Britain during the medieval period. Alongside this, I’m taking a particular interest in the work of the ‘Oxford dictatores’, a gaggle of proto-business-school teachers whose output includes model letters, advice on how to behave in court, and lively sample conversations that wouldn’t be likely to appear in your standard Year 9 French textbook.

Alongside this work, I’m developing projects in two related areas. The first is the digital humanities, specifically in how we can use digital editions to represent medieval texts in ways that traditional print approaches don’t allow. Second, I’m exploring ways of thinking about neurodivergence through a literary-historical lens.

Image: Latin, French, and English on the page. From Cambridge, Trinity College Library, MS B.14.40 (fol. 137^r).