Group members

Anne Baden-Daintree

Anne works on both medieval and contemporary literature and culture. Her medieval research is mainly concerned with lyric poetry, late medieval devotional culture, and death and bereavement. She is currently working on the reception of the Song of Songs in medieval England, and the influence of its dramatic and textual processes on works in a range of genres. More recently, she has been researching depictions of old age and ageing in medieval lyric.

Mary Bateman

Mary is a researcher of medieval and early modern literature and culture. She is interested in the intersections between text, popular tradition, and other kinds of media with regards to memory and place. Her forthcoming book examines the role of local places in the reception and defence of King Arthur in premodern England and Wales. Her next project investigates the transnational production and reception of national foundation myths in 15th and 16th century Europe.

Steve De Hailes

Steve’s research centres on the liminal and otherworldly landscapes found in medieval and early modern literature. He is particularly interested in the role that highland topographies (hills, plateaus, mountains, cliffs, valleys) play in the medieval and early modern imagination, and in the otherworldly creatures and entities who appear in mountainous and similarly-liminal landscapes throughout this period.

Helen Fulton

Helen is interested in medieval literary history, especially the influences and interactions between English, Welsh and French; border cultures and the social construction of space; history and literature in the medieval Marches of Wales; literature and politics; medieval towns and urban cultures; maps and mapping.

Cathy Hume

Cathy works on medieval literature and its social and cultural contexts.  Her first book was on Chaucer. More recently she has been working on biblical poetry, and is currently editing an anthology of biblical poems for TEAMS Middle English Texts.  She is also interested in cognitive approaches to narrative, ethics in literature, and the intersections between narrative and drama.

Kathleen Kennedy

Following monographs on the media archaeology of law translation and illuminated Wycliffite Bibles, Kathleen E. Kennedy holds a British Academy Global Professorship on fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century art in manuscript and early printed books. She has also published on material culture and medieval England's trade in luxury commodities, including coconuts.

Kate McClune

Kate’s primary research focus is Older Scots literature (particularly manuscript compilation and transmisssion).  She is also interested in literature of the borders - that is, work that relates to senses of place and belonging in real or imagined border territories (insular, international, maritime, supernatural). More recently, she has been working on the relationship between medieval archival material and contemporary approaches to animal conservation.

Ad Putter

Ad is interested in medieval literatures and languages, particularly English, French, Latin and Dutch. The Gawain poet has been an interest since his PhD on the influence of French Arthurian romance on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and he has published an edition, The Works of the Gawain Poet, with Myra Stokes. Other interests include stories about King Arthur and metre (especially alliterative metre). He is currently working on a Leverhume-funded project on Anglo-Dutch relations in the medieval and early modern period.

Hattie Soper

Hattie is a specialist in early medieval literature, including Old English and Old Norse. The first phase of her research focused on experiences of aging in English contexts. This led to a monograph, The Life Course in Old English Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and an edited volume, Early Medieval English Life Courses: Cultural-Historical Perspectives (Brill, 2022, with Thijs Porck). Her more recent work examines the importance of echoes in and around Old Norse eddic poetry, and argues for the impact of Old English verse on the eddic tradition and vice versa.

Leah Tether

Leah is a scholar of medieval French and English literature, Arthurian romance, book and library history and publishing studies. She has recently published The Bristol Merlin: Revealing the Hidden Secrets of a Medieval Fragment (ARC Humanities Press, 2021). Her current research project 'Unpublished' looks at the conditions governing why certain medieval texts that were widely transmitted in manuscript were not selected for print in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Sebastiaan Verweij 

Sebastiaan is interested inlate medieval and early modern literature (especially poetry), and 'the history of the book'. He is especially interested in the intersections between the book as material text and more literary questions. He works on the literary and book culture of Scotland; have an interest in the Digital Humanities; in editorial theory and practice; and on John Donne. Currently, he is working on a British Academy funded project, the Literatures of Older Scotland Database (LOSD), and a study of the representation of place in poetic and other texts.