digital scholarship

I use digital media in the classroom and in my research. I favor collaborative projects. Some platforms I’ve used for digital work are Lit Genius, MediaKron, and the Yale Mirador Viewer.

A Bird in Bishopswood

A poem guide, with an associated translation. “A Bird in Bishopswood” is an immersive springtime lyric scribbled on the back of a rental account for St. Paul’s Cathedral dated to circa 1395. Based on Ruth Kennedy’s careful comparison of the handwriting, scholars surmise that the author of the poem is John Tickhill, who served as…

Alliterative Verse / Avant-Garde

A curated collection of poems, premodern and contemporary, hosted at poetryfoundation.org. This symbol (/), the virgule, was often the only mark of punctuation used by medieval scribes copying English poetry. The virgule is the ancestor of the comma. Rather than indicating mutually exclusive alternatives, as in some cases in modern usage, the scribes’ virgule connected…

Middle English Alliterative Poetry

[update Sept 2024: the site has been archived, here] A companion website for Boston College ENGL4424: Middle English Alliterative Poetry. It may also be used as a general introduction to this medieval poetic corpus. The special areas of focus throughout this website are metrical form, manuscript context, and literary context. Most pages include a selective, hyperlinked…

Prosody: Alternative Histories

What are the historical stakes of prosody, and why should we ask? ‘Prosody’ refers both to the patterning of language in poetry and to the formal study of that patterning. In both senses, it is roughly synonymous with ‘versification.’ Like many terms in the modern study of poetics, ‘prosody’ derives from a Greek word of much wider application…

Mapping Chaucer

[update Sept 2024: the site has been archived, here] A companion website to Boston College ENGL3393: Chaucer. It may also be used as a general introduction to Geoffrey Chaucer’s poetry. The special areas of focus throughout this website are localization and imagined spaces. The site includes map tours of Chaucer’s life, the frame narrative of the Canterbury Tales, and individual…

New England Medieval Consortium

The New England Medieval Consortium was founded by Archibald Lewis (University of Massachusetts at Amherst) in 1974. Its annual meeting is held at a member institution in New England, usually on a Saturday in October or early November. I created the NEMC website with Gregory Halfond and maintain it myself. New England Medieval Consortium

Gawain in 101 tweets

In March 2015, I composed a translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in 101 tweets, corresponding to the 101 stanzas of the original Middle English alliterative poem. This project was inspired by Elaine Treharne’s translation of the Old English poem Beowulf in 100 tweets and Alice-Catherine Jennings’s translation of the Old French poem Song of Roland in 291 tweets. To create my translation, I cross-referenced Neilson’s translation with the…

Digitally Enabled Scholarship with Medieval Manuscripts

Medieval manuscripts are windows to the past and their study leads to important literary, historical, and social insights. However, using medieval manuscripts has always been challenging – they are distributed in collections throughout the world and access to them often is limited because of their age and condition. Scholarship has relied upon physical examination and…