The team
Dr Sarah James
Dr Sarah James
My research interests are centred around vernacular theological writing in the later Middle Ages, particularly hagiography, homiletic writings and didactic texts. I ask 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.
The stimulus for this project was two-fold: first, I had encountered the Middle English Elucidarium almost by accident in two manuscripts in Cambridge, and was fascinated by its combination of what appeared to be naïve didacticism and detailed theological exposition. Second, I participated in the closing conference for another AHRC-funded project, ‘Geographies of Orthodoxy’ at Queen’s University, Belfast, and realised that some of the methodologies used on that project would transfer very well to a study of the vernacular Elucidarium in England.
Huw Grange
Huw Grange
A specialist in medieval French and Occitan literature, the focus of my recent research has been vernacular saints’ lives, a marginal genre today within medieval studies, perhaps, but one which delighted all manner of audiences in the Middle Ages. My doctoral dissertation explores the intriguing bodies of saints and monsters – sometimes repugnant, sometimes deliciously attractive – in a selection of French and Occitan saints’ lives. Often working with previously unedited manuscript material, I ask what these shape-shifting creatures can tell us about wider issues relating to identity formation (religious or otherwise) in the later centuries of the Middle Ages. In addition to my work on the saints and their monstrous antagonists, I am always keen to foster my interests in vernacular lyric, medieval music and modern critical theory.