Month: August 2024

I was incredibly grateful to KP Pilley at the Thouron Award and LaRahia Smith at UH for writing pieces about my work.

You can read them here and here.

Michelle Warren’s Holy Digital Grail is a fascinating book about the long history of a medieval manuscript, from its creation to its place as a digitized object on the internet. I frequently use digitized manuscripts in my research and teaching, but it was only when reading Warren’s book that I stopped to think more about the infrastructures that sustain them. Often, freely accessible internet content is represented as unambiguously positive, but as Warren shows, it comes with great costs attached, particularly in terms of capital and environmental impact. The book changed the way I think about my research and my teaching, and I’m grateful I got the opportunity to review it for Modern Language Quarterly:

Like manuscripts themselves, digitization is the product of political and social history. Warren shows that when we encounter MS 80, our meeting is conditioned by infrastructures that enable our engagement—technologies supporting the website, the history of those technologies, and the funding that enabled their development, for instance—but also by the longer history of text technologies that have led to the manuscript’s survival and virtual reproduction. Thus the story of MS 80 encompasses the social and political conditions that created the tech boom in Silicon Valley, the ecological cost of the servers that host the Parker Library on the Web, the Reformation history that created Cor- pus Christi College’s Parker Library, and the mercantilism and nascent cultures of European colonialism and imperialism encoded in the manuscript from its origin. One manuscript may seem a small target for a monograph, but as the list above makes clear, Holy Digital Grail’s true focus is the deep history mediating our engagement with material objects. The study is a transformative account of contemporary manuscript research that illuminates the long-obscured institutional and infrastructural histories that drive medievalist scholarship.

You can read the review here.

In April 2024, Manchester University Press published Literatures of the Hundred Years War, a volume of twelve essays I co-edited with my friend and colleague R.D. Perry (University of Tennessee-Knoxville). Editing the book during the course of the pandemic certainly had its challenges, but we’re immensely grateful to Manchester University Press and to our contributors for their support.

Here is the table of contents:

Preface – Ardis Butterfield

Introduction: Literatures of the Hundred Years War – Daniel Davies and R.D. Perry

1. Infinite Tragedy and the Hundred Years War – Andrew Galloway
2. Forms Against War: the pastourelle and the Hundred Years War – Elizaveta Strakhov
3. Prophecies of Alliance and Enmity: England, Scotland and France in the late Middle Ages – Daniel Davies
4. Italy, poetry and the Hundred Years War – David Wallace
5. Merchandising Peace – Lynn Staley
6. Mobility and Migration: Calais and the Welsh Imagination in the late Middle Ages – Helen Fulton
7. The shared wound: Crusade and the origins of the Hundred Years War in the writings of Philippe de Mézières – Stefan Vander Elst
8. Mirrors of war: chronicle narratives, class conflict and regiminal ideology between France and England, c. 1330-1415 – Matthew Giancarlo
9. Dreaming the (un)divided nation: Alain Chartier’s allegorical oneiropolitics – Lucas Wood
10. War, tears and corporeal response in Christine de Pizan – Alani Hicks-Bartlett
11. Visionary women, the Papal Schism and the Hundred Years War: Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena in medieval England – Jennifer N. Brown
12. Between men: French books and male readers in fifteenth-century England – J.R. Mattison

Instead of an extract, here is the acknowledgements, the most important part of the book:

“Emily Steiner first suggested we put together a volume on the Hundred Years War at ‘Method and the Middle English Text’ held in Charlottesville, Virginia on 8–9 April 2016. We are grateful for her inspiration: this book would not exist without her. We would like to thank Marina Bilbija, Taylor Cowdery, H. M. Cushman, Sonja Drimmer, Ruth Evans, Walt Hunter, Sierra Lomuto, Jonathan Morton, Vince Sherry, Zachary E. Stone, Spencer Strub, Lindsay Turner, Sunny C. Yang and all those who supported this project through advice, feedback and encouragement. Audiences at the Medieval Academy of America (2018) and International Congress on Medieval Studies (2019) helped hone several of the chapters. The volume is available free of charge through Open Access thanks to the support of the Colgate University Research Council, Andrew Galloway, the Faculty of Arts at the University of Bristol, the University of Denver’s Open Access Publication Equity Fund and the University of Houston’s CLASS Book Completion Fund and Small Grants Program. The University of Houston provided further support through the Martha Gano Houstoun Research Grant in Literary Criticism. At Manchester University Press we are grateful to Meredith Carroll for advocacy, patience and support, especially through the ­ COVID-19 pandemic, and to Laura Swift, Juanita Bullough, Ideas on Fire, Karen Nash, and everyone involved in the production process for their expertise and assistance. Likewise, we are grateful to Anke Bernau, David Matthews and the volume’s anonymous readers, at the proposal and manuscript stage, who helped clarify the volume’s focus. Above all, we want to thank our contributors for their ­ generosity and commitment.”

You can access the book free of charge here.