Two scraps of a medieval manuscript salvaged from the binding of a 16th century copy of the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes Vitae Christi.

I use this page to share some of my academic interests and ongoing projects, mostly in the area of late medieval literature and culture. The illustrations are from my very small collection of medieval manuscript fragments and leaves.

My research interests

My research focuses on the religious culture in the late medieval period, c. 1350-1550. I am particularly interested in Middle English religious and mystical writing, performance and affective forms of devotion, religious lyric religious, religious drama, Lollardy and heresy, medieval theology and intellectual history in general. With Ian Johnson from the University of St Andrews I have published a volume of essays entitled The Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ: Exploring the Middle English Tradition. This publication investigates the literary tradition of Middle English Lives of Christ in its cultural, theological, and manuscript contexts. A related research interest is in the areas of book history and the history of reading. Some of my most recent research consists of a number of case studies that looks at the book collections and reading practices of a Catholic community in nineteenth-century New Hampshire. This has appeared as Books and Religious Devotion: The Redemptive Reading of an Irishman in Nineteenth Century New Hampshire (Penn State University Press, 2014).

Teaching

I have taught at universities in Poland, Denmark, and the University of St Andrews. My teaching has focused on subjects of medieval and early modern literature, from Old English writing to John Milton. I have also taught survey courses on British literature from the Anglo Saxon period to the present, and contributed to seminars on literary theory and the history of the English language.

Qualifications

BA Aarhus University (English & Philosophy), 1995

MA Aarhus University, English Language and Literature,1998

MA Queen's University Belfast (English Medieval Studies), 1999

PhD Aarhus University (English Medieval Literature), 2007

PostDoc University of St Andrews, 2007-11

With the Reformation (often proclaimed as the triumph of the printed book) it was common for discarded medieval manuscript to be cut up and used as part of book bindings.

Books and Religious Devotion is a study of a remarkable book collection of a nineteenth-century New England farmer, Thomas Connary. Through a detailed reconstruction of how this Irish Catholic immigrant read and annotated his books, the study gives new insight into the capacity of books for structuring a life of devotion and social participation, and it presents an authentic and holistic view of one reader’s interior life.

This is a collection of pioneering studies by a distinguished transatlantic team of scholars on a neglected yet canonical tradition of medieval English literature. From the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries and beyond, the remarkable ‘pseudo-Bonaventuran’ tradition, flowing from the Latin Meditationes vitae Christi (and thought, wrongly, to have been composed by St Bonaventure), gave Europe orthodox models for how to represent, know, and follow Jesus Christ. How to live, what to believe, how to feel, and how to be saved: this eloquent mainstream tradition had an impact on the public and private lives of English people more profound and lasting than any text save the Bible itself. For many, it even did the Bible’s work. The tradition of the Meditationes provides us with a gauge of lived religious sensibility without equal in the English later Middle Ages.