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The University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NZ, T +44 (0)1227 764000
Dr Sarah James
(BA, MA, MPhil, PhD, Cantab.)
| Lecturer | Deputy Director, Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies |
|---|---|
| Phone: 01227 (82)7287 | Office: NC 9 |
| Email: s.james@kent.ac.uk |
Research Interests
My research interests are centred around theological writing in the later Middle Ages, asking questions about the ways in which medieval writers engaged with the religious debates of the day, and how ordinary people, for the most part with very limited access to written texts, experienced religion. The visual culture of the Middle Ages, exemplified in illuminated manuscripts and church architecture and decoration, is an important influence on my thinking, as indeed it was for medieval writers themselves.
A historicist and close reader by instinct and training, I find myself increasingly interested in exploring how far methodologies from other disciplines might illuminate my work. I am currently writing a book which draws upon sociological and anthropological theories of identity and boundaries to explore the ways in which people imagined religious identity in fifteenth-century East Anglia.
Many of the texts I explore fall outside the standard literary canon, and are often unprinted, raising further questions about the status and purpose of particular manuscripts. For example, what might we infer about a manuscript’s owner, and about contemporary reading practices, when a series of apparently unrelated texts come to be bound together in a single manuscript? The opportunity to work with manuscripts is one of the great pleasures of being a medievalist, and I am currently working on an edition of Middle English versions of the Elucidarium, a highly influential Latin theological text.
Research Supervision
I welcome graduate students in any of my areas of interest. I am currently supervising doctoral students working on the cultural construction of kingship in the late Middle Ages, and on the relationships between image and text in medieval manuscripts.
Teaching
MA in Medieval and Early Modern Studies
The Gothic Imagination: English Art and Literature in the Later Middle Ages
Encountering the Holy: Devotion and the Medieval Church
Intensive Introduction to Latin Grammar
Recent publications
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‘ “Langagis, whos reules ben not writen”: Pecock and the uses of the vernacular’, in Elisabeth Salter and Helen Wicker, eds. Vernacularity in England and Wales, c.1300-1550, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 17, (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming 2010)
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'Revaluing Vernacular Theology: The Case of Reginald Pecock', Leeds Studies in English, n.s. 33 (2002), 135-69
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'"Doctryne and studie": female learning and religious debate in Capgrave's Life of St Katharine', Leeds Studies in English, n.s. 36 (2005), 275-302
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The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages: entries on Joseph, father of Jesus; Cobham, Eleanor; Kempe, John; Love, Nicholas, Oldcastle, Sir John; Whethamsted, John; Clarendon, Constitutions of; Pecock, Reginald (forthcoming)