Articles and Book Chapters

‘Sonic Journeys on the Open Sea: Testing the Faithful in Old English and Anglo-Latin Literature, The Review of English Studies 75 (2024), 127–144.

‘The Sound-World of Early Medieval England: A Case Study of the Exeter Book Storm Riddle’, book chapter in Ideas of the World in Early Medieval England, ed. Kazutomo Karasawa, Francis Leneghan, and Mark Atherton (Brepols, 2022).

‘Biophonic Soundscapes in the Vitae of St Guthlac’, English Studies 102 (2021), 155–79.

This article explores the use of biophonic sonic information in the primary Vitae of one early English saint, Guthlac: Felix’s Latin Vita S. Guthlaci, the Old English Prose Life of Guthlac, and the Old English poems Guthlac A and Guthlac B. It reveals that the sounds created by various animals, from the croak of a raven to the bellowing of a bull, are utilised for two purposes in these texts: first, to disturb the saint, to shatter his eremitic pursuits and imitatio Christi; second, to highlight Guthlac’s successful maintenance of his stablitas in the face of such sonic attacks. This use of biophony speaks to hagiography more generally, and aims to provide a model for further study into the role of sound in Anglo-Latin and Old English literature.

‘St Cuthbert as Lamp: the Ideal Gregorian Monk-Pastor in Bede’s Vita metrica S. Cudbercti’, Peritia 30 (2020), 53­–70.

This article argues that the Venerable Bede already advocated Gregory the Great’s ideal of the monk-pastor in his early metrical Vita sancti Cuthberti (VCM); a role that Bede saw St Cuthbert as fulfilling. Part of the way Bede refashions Cuthbert into an idealized Gregorian monk-pastor is by means of lamp imagery directly connected with Jesus’ parable of the lamp under a bushel in the New Testament. Such a presentation of Cuthbert highlights Bede’s conception of the wider relevance of the saint; a depiction often discussed in terms of Bede’s prose Vita sancti Cuthberti and Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum. This study shows that these developments were well underway in the early metrical life (VCM).

‘Felix’s Construction of the English Fenlands: Literal Landscape, Authorizing Allusion, and Lexical Echo in his Vita Sancti Guthlaci’, in Guthlac: Crowland’s Saint, edited by Jane Roberts and Alan Thacker (Shaun Tyas: Paul Watkins Publishing, 2020).

This article explores the literary construction of the English fenlands in Felx’s Vita Sancti Guthlaci. It argues that Felix, while making use of words, phrases, images, and topoi from a wide range of sources, creates the landscape experientially, describing it in physical terms and without dependence on intertextual allusion, and that his use of source material falls into two categories: what I will call ‘authorizing allusion’ and ‘lexical echo’. An authorizing allusion is a lengthy quotation, on average over twenty words, used by Felix for the purpose of legitimizing his relatively unknown saint. Lexical echoes, by contrast extremely short and averaging three words, are mechanical reflexes of Felix’s education, and are employed solely as a functional means of poetic description. The result is a depiction of the physical landscape that is highly accurate, descriptive, and evocative, and which is used by Felix to present an English saint pursuing the ascetic life in a thoroughly English and recognizable landscape.

‘Intimacy, Interdependence, and Interiority in the Old English Prose Boethius’, Neophilologus 102 (2018), 525–42.

This article explores voice in the prose (B Text) version of the Old English Boethius. It argues that the Old English Boethius transforms the Socratic dialogue of its main Latin source, Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae, into an interdependent dialogue focused on the inner life. This transformation of the Old English Boethius fits into two categories: first, the initial split of voices that refo- cuses the first two-thirds of the text on Boethius’s mod; and second, the expansion of direct address to the audience by Wisdom. The Old English Boethius can, therefore, be read as a distinctly Anglo-Saxon philosophical pursuit, where the path to God is through the development of interdependent relationships.

‘A New Source for the Anonymous Vita S. Cuthberti’, Notes and Queries 62 (2015), 356–58.

This article reveals a new source for the anonymous Vita Sancti Cuthberti: St Jerome’s Commentariorum in Mathaeum libri iv. The source is used by the hagiographer to distinguish between miracles which are essentially visionary, involving no change of the physical world, and those which are descriptions of actual events within the physical world. By tracing this source, the article not only establishes further ways hagiography was influenced by received exegesis, but also highlights, through discussion of MS Shewsbury 1052/1, how widespread and available copies of texts like Jerome’s Commentarywere in the 8thand 9thcentury, particularly for the authors living in Northumbria’s golden age.

‘Tolkien’s Technique of Translation in his Prose Beowulf: Literalism and Literariness’, Mallorn55 (2014), 23–5.

This article argues that Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf reveals a desire to imaginatively understand Early English poets and their poetry, to hear and see as they would have, through a specific translation methodology, primarily aimed at further illuminating the original Old English text. Tolkien’s technique for translation seeks a balance between literalism, and its associated benefits for engagement with the original text, and literariness, by which the translation may avoid ‘false modernity’ and retain a degree of integrity to the Old English.