My newest book, Literary Form in Early Medieval England, is available open access here for the next two weeks! Come download it for free! This is part of the Cambridge series Elements in England in the Early Medieval World.

Here’s a quick description of the book:

“The earliest English writers left little comment on their literary forms. In contrast to the grammatical treatises of late antiquity or critical studies of contemporary and modern literature, early medieval English writing offers only sparse contemporaneous self-commentary, often in brief or conventional notes along the way to other things. But Old English and Latin literature had lively and evolving practices of literary form and formal innovation. Literary Form in Early Medieval England examines both more and lesser known forms, considering the multilingual landscape of early medieval England and showing that Old English literary forms do not simply end with the rupture of the Norman Conquest but continue in surprising ways. Literary Form in Early Medieval England offers a concise tour of what we do know of literary forms, both those that have received more attention and those that have been relatively overlooked, across the first six centuries of English literature.”

Last month I was delighted to share my work in progress, “Nonimpossible Things: St. Eustace’s Crisis of Belief” the Yale Medieval Colloquium. This work comes from my ongoing research on the ways that narrative works in early medieval England. Looking forward to sharing more of this work soon!

My article, “The Hero of His Own Life: Beowulf, Jesus, and the Poetics of the Old English Andreas” is now available in JEGP 123, no. 4! You can find it here, or email me for a copy.

This summer I visited the British Library in London and the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and presented some of my ongoing research on Old English narrative at the Leeds International Medieval Congress. Looking forward to developing this work for an article soon–stay tuned!

CFPs for Old English Panels at MLA 2025 in New Orleans – please share widely! Abstracts due by March 15.

INVISIBLE VIOLENCE AND ARCHIVAL ERASURE

Recent scholarship on early medieval England has provoked a reparative moment: as researchers, often early career scholars, engage newly explicitly diverse theoretical and political commitments, they ask us all to re-evaluate the ways that we determine our field and navigate the archives that constitute it. This session aims to foreground such important work and to consider not only ways that past scholarship and the medieval archive itself might perpetuate racist, antisemitic, Islamophobic, homophobic, transphobic, ablest, misogynist paradigms of thought and being, but also how a focus on this aspect of medieval and medievalist archives might enable some disentanglement of the violences, omissions, and silences of the archive from the perpetuation or creation of those violences in the scholarship.

Papers might include those that theorize Old English poetry and prose; study the history of scholarship that has perpetuated the abuses and omissions of the past; articulate methodologies that might uncover the lives of medieval people previously excised from scholarly histories; etc. Send a 250 word abstract and CV to Jennifer Lorden (jalorden@wm.edu) and Benjamin Saltzman (saltzman@uchicago.edu).

THE POETICS AND POLITICS OF VISIBILITY IN OLD ENGLISH

Much scholarship has considered how Old English literature handles sensory information, and in particular models of seeing or being seen, and how certain images and scenes evoke associations that resonate across the poetic corpus. At times, Old English poetry also temporarily withholds images from view, only for them to be revealed later with heightened effect. For its part, scholarship in the field has also focused attention on particular images of Old English poetry, leaving other aspects of the literature overlooked or even concealed.

This session invites papers considering how Old English poetry and the modern study thereof have made things visible or withheld them from view, or used figurative and literal depictions of vision. Approaches might range from studies of poetics to affect studies, disability studies to gender and sexuality, and/or considerations of the ways Old English texts handle the figurative and literal implications of sensory perception. Send a 250 word abstract and CV to Jennifer Lorden (jalorden@wm.edu) and Benjamin Saltzman (saltzman@uchicago.edu).

EXPERIMENTS IN NEW POETRY WITH OLD ENGLISH, OLD FRENCH, AND OLD SPANISH: A ROUNDTABLE

We invite poets who have engaged with or are interested in engaging with Old English, Old French, and/or Old Spanish to participate in a roundtable as an occasion to reflect on, speak to, or experiment with modes of translation, inspiration, revision, and other ways of creating in relation to the earliest forms of these languages. This special session is organized by members of the Poetry and Poetics Forum, the Old English Forum, the Medieval Iberian Forum, and the Medieval French Forum. Send 250 word abstract and CV to Benjamin Saltzman at saltzman@uchicago.edu.

I’m delighted to be speaking at the Cornell Medieval Studies Student Colloquium today. I’ll be speaking on “Mixed Feelings: Finding Medieval Affect in Early English Poetics.” You can find a program for the event here.

This week I was delighted to present some new work at the symposium, “Elsewheres and Otherworlds: New Work in Early English Studies” at UNC. You can find more information about the symposium here.

For Fifteen Eighty Four, I wrote about my new book, Forms of Devotion in Early English Poetry, and how modern scholars think about the past. Check it out here.

My book, Forms of Devotion in Early English Poetry, is available in hardback and ebook from Cambridge University Press! You can buy a copy here, or ask your library to buy one!