Research

I completed my PhD thesis, Imagining and Enacting Education in the French Texts of Post-Conquest England, in autumn 2020, and was awarded my doctorate in February 2021; my work was supervised by Dr. Thomas Hinton, Prof. Emma Cayley (now at the University of Leeds), and Dr. Susana Afonso. My research has focused on the use of French in medieval England in the centuries following the Norman Conquest, a field variously known as Anglo-Norman, insular French, and the ‘French of England’. I have a particular interest in texts that challenge traditional notions of the literary, ranging from calendrical material to so-called ‘courtesy-books’; both of these genres of Anglo-Norman text appeared as chapters in my PhD thesis.

From a theoretical perspective, my research draws on the domains of History of the Book, manuscript studies, and theories of language contact and change. Cognitive lexical semantics played a significant role in the first chapter of my PhD thesis, where I mapped the semantic field surrounding verbs of instruction in the French of medieval England.

I also employ the methodologies and insights offered by textual criticism, and have a keen interest in where these interact with the digital humanities. My work on the Learning French in Medieval England project has allowed me to develop this interest further, and I am eager to explore further areas in which medieval French studies can benefit from this interplay.