Today, Tynemouth Priory (above) looks a likely place for a haunting. The ruin stands tall and gaunt at the high point of the windswept Northumberland coastline. Advancing towards its hollow east end is a wave of weathered gravestones. There was no gothic cemetery outside when it was a living community of monks (Benedictine) but the […]
Five months on from our previous post, work has been proceeding apace at the ‘Learning French in Medieval England’ project — or, as literally no-one is calling it, ‘Tretiz Towers’. Our primary focus at the moment remains the work that we’re doing on the project’s central strand: namely, producing a digital edition of the Tretiz‘s 17 extant manuscripts. […]
Writing in 1879, the great Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins bemoaned the recent felling of the poplars at Binsey near Oxford: ‘All felled, felled, are all felled’. To him, those trees represented something precious, a ‘sweet especial rural scene’. Had he been alive in 1615, he might have felt similarly outraged about what had taken […]
Five hundred years ago this week the monarchies of England and France met in the meadowland of the Pas-de-Calais. Today these flatlands are largely nondescript for the traffic that flashes past them on the A26, ‘l’Avenue des Anglais’, but even now the fields six kilometres to the east of Guînes, on the edge of the […]
Since I have the dubious honour of being the most active member of staff (here at Exeter) on social media, I’m periodically asked how students and scholars new to this brave new world should navigate it. Ultimately, there’s no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to go about social media engagement; but here are a few rather […]
Just over two months ago, we announced the start of a new project based at the Centre for Medieval Studies here in Exeter: Learning French in Medieval England. Our aim is to produce a digital edition of Walter de Bibbesworth’s Tretiz, a rhymed French vocabulary of the mid-thirteenth century that has attracted significant critical interest […]
Since I’ve been on maternity leave I’ve not surprisingly been pondering all things to do with pregnancy and baby care. I’ve also been thinking about medieval pregnancy advice, since it’s a topic I’ve touched on during my ongoing research on medieval fertility and infertility. Medical texts are probably the medieval sources which give most information […]
Vestez vos dras, biau douz enfaunz, Chaucez vos brais, soulers, et gaunz. […] De une corroie vous ceintez — Ne di pas ‘vous enceintez’, Car femme est par home enceinte Et de une ceinture est ele ceinte. Put on your clothes, my sweet child: don your breeches, shoes, and gloves. Lock up your belt-buckle — but do not say ‘knock up’, for a woman is knocked up by a man, but is locked up within a belt. This somewhat risqué passage of French […]
One of the pillars of the Medieval Studies community at Exeter, Emma Cayley, left the university over the summer to take up a post as Head of School of Languages, Cultures and Societies at Leeds. Our loss is Leeds’s gain, as I know from personal experience having been hired and served my probation during Emma’s […]
As my colleagues at Exeter know, I have spent the past few years looking at the concept of news in the Middle Ages. I’ve been considering what the idea of ‘news’ meant in the medieval world, what sources remain for news, and what studies of news in the Middle Ages might tell us about news […]