My research centers on late-medieval literary and historical writing, with a particular focus on how texts mediate social and political contexts.
Book Projects
Monograph
Everyday War is an account of how late-medieval England’s conflicts with France and Scotland created a culture of perpetual war that imagined war as the default state of society. Reading across literary, historical, philosophical, and archival sources, the project makes three interventions. First, it demonstrates how literary works shape conceptions of war, deepening literary scholarship that analyzes war as context. Second, it focuses on England’s imperial ambitions rather than individual conflicts to show how insular dominance and continental expansion intersect. Third, it establishes a new paradigm for understanding war’s enduring grip on international relations centered on late-medieval enmity, challenging accounts that create a sharp divide between medieval and modern warfare.
Literatures of the Hundred Years War
This volume demonstrates how the Hundred Years War (1337–1453) provides a necessary context for late-medieval literature. Many of the major writers of the period, in a variety of different languages, lived either all or most of their lives under war’s shadow, including Geoffrey Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Bridget of Sweden. The essays collected here investigate how authors use strategies including translation, adaptation, and allegory in order to respond to the War. Simultaneously, they make a case for reconsidering how literature like women’s visionary writing or lyric poetry, not generally seen as war literature, form part of the broader context of European warfare. As it extends the boundaries of what counts as war literature, the volume also moves beyond the traditional Anglo-French framing of the conflict by considering authors enmeshed in the conflict through proxy battles, diplomatic ties, and ideological disputes. While covering English and French writers explicitly writing to the war, like John Lydgate or Alain Chartier, it also explores the war writing of prominent Welsh, Scottish and Italian authors, like Dafydd ap Gwilym, Walter Bower, and Catherine of Siena. The volume models a synthetic and transnational literary history of conflict that will pave the way for future scholarship in earlier and later periods. The essays in this volume show how literature did more than reflect the realities of the Hundred Years War; it was also a crucial site for contesting the claims of war as literary writers crafted ways to actively intervene in the conflict.
Peer-Reviewed Articles
“Medieval Scottish Historians and the Contest for Britain.” Modern Language Quarterly, 82.2 (2021): 149-175.
“‘Wereyed on every side’: Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and the Logic of Siege Warfare.” New Medieval Literatures 20 (2020): 74-106.
“A New Manuscript of Knyghthode and Bataile.” With A.S.G. Edwards (University of Kent), Medium Ævum 87.1 (2018): 137-141.
Book Chapters
“Alliance, Antagonism, and Resistance: Scotland in the Hundred Years War.” Chapter submitted to Literatures of the Hundred Years War.
References Works
“The Hundred Years War” and “The Yeoman” in The Chaucer Encyclopedia, gen. ed. Richard Newhauser (Forthcoming, Wiley-Blackwell).
Book Reviews
Terrell, Katherine H. Scripting the Nation: Court Poetry and Authority in Late Medieval Scotland (2021). Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 44 (2022): 433-436.
Bellis, Joanna. The Hundred Years War in Literature, 1337-1600 (2016). Review of English Studies, 68.283 (2017): 168-170.