My interests in medieval religious literature, pastoral care, and reference books emerge from my recently completed monograph. This monograph reappraises the most popular late-medieval English author: a Yorkshire hermit named Richard Rolle. Where past scholars have often characterised him as an isolated eccentric, my book reinterprets him as a mainstream literary writer by contextualising his work among European traditions of medieval spiritual compendia, offering a fresh perspective on his writerly craft. Further, my monograph makes a larger intervention by proposing new paradigms for thinking about ‘compilation’, a dominant term in medieval studies which has shaped our understanding of medieval concepts of authority, authorship, and the organisation of books. I suggest that Rolle’s works can be better illuminated by looser compilations and compendia that circulated widely beyond the medieval universities: texts which embrace miscellaneity, adopt a more fluid relationship with ‘the authorities’, and blur the lines between the ‘compiler’ and ‘author’. In this way, my book offers a new take on the distinct blend of allusion and reinvention that characterises medieval authorship.

My interest in rethinking standard accounts of medieval compilation formed the basis of my project at the Parker Library and remains a theme in my ongoing research on textual form. Scholars have long recognised that the rise of the universities and the development of compilations as study aids in the thirteenth century drove increasingly sophisticated methods for organising and navigating received knowledge, but I am interested in understanding why many late-medieval texts and books produced centuries later nonetheless seem strangely disorganised. My monograph proposed a new definition for miscellaneity, responding to the difficulties scholars have had in analysing something that essentially defies definition, and I make an argument there that miscellaneity is an important and distinct feature of the religious literature of late-medieval England. Building on this interest, I recently completed an article on how formal compilations stimulated the composition of new texts in diverse forms.

Fundamental to my research on the forms and literary contexts of medieval spirituality is attention to their material forms in manuscripts. I am committed to making medieval literature available through textual editing and translation. . A particularly clear instance is my rediscovery of the original version of Richard Rolle’s Latin work Emendatio vitae: his most mature statement on the spiritual life and a hugely popular text (120 copies). Shrewsbury School, MS 25 is a manuscript containing a unique, longer version of the text, followed by a dedication to ‘William’. The text's previous editor argues that this version was interpolated by a scribe and that the dedication was a forgery. My article proves not only that this longer version was by Rolle, but that this is the only surviving copy of what Rolle actually wrote, that the dedication is authentic, and that all other copies are an abridgement made by someone else. This discovery received international media coverage (links below).

Monographs and Editions

• Compendiousness and Literary Craft in Richard Rolle's Writings: Compilation, Form, and Authorship (monograph, in negotiation)
• Richard Rolle's Emendatio vitae and Other Works (critical edition, under advance contract with PIMS)

Peer-Reviewed Articles

• ‘The Original Text, Recipient, and Manuscript Presentation of Richard Rolle’s Emendatio vitae [The Amending of Life]’, Mediaeval Studies 85 (2025 for 2023), 163–238.
• ‘“Strange in His Ways, Strange in His Words”: Eccentricity, Eremitism, and Autobiography in the Writings of Richard Rolle’, Speculum 99.4 (2024), 1052–65. DOI:10.1086/731947
• ‘Late-Medieval Commonplace Culture, the Pastoral Compendium, and the Form of Richard Rolle’s The Form of Living’, Review of English Studies 75, issue 319 (2024), 165–83. DOI:10.1093/res/hgae007
• ‘Richard Rolle’s Commentary on the Lord’s Prayer: Composition, Text, Reception’, The Journal of Medieval Latin 34 (2024), 189–251. DOI:10.1484/J.JML.5.136332
• ‘Singing from Manuscripts? Fifteenth-Century, English, Secular Songs with Music and their Reading Practices’, Postgraduate English: A Journal and Forum for Postgraduates in English 33 (2016), 1–30.

Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters

• ‘Richard Rolle and the Heresy of the Free Spirit’, Medieval Mystical Tradition in England IX, ed. E.A. Jones (Woodbridge, 2025), pp. 16–33 DOI:10.2307/jj.22679791.8

PopLatin: Priests’ Books and the Popularisation of the Contemplative Life in England, 1300–1550

(Marie Skłodowska-Curie Project funded by the European Research Council, 2025–2027)

PopLatin aims to write a new history of lay contemplative spirituality in the Middle Ages. Medieval people understood ‘contemplation’ as the highest religious experience: a revelation of divine love that could only occur, rarely, for those most committed to God. PopLatin offers a novel account of medieval contemplative spirituality by focusing on sources that scholars have largely overlooked: namely, the Latin textbooks that medieval priests used to teach their congregations. Latin priests’ books popularised famous medieval writers by transforming their teachings into more accessible forms, which priests then used to instruct their parishioners orally. The premise of PopLatin is that these neglected sources offer a new history of lay contemplative spirituality in the Middle Ages. By showing, counter-intuitively, that Latin was a language of popularisation through texts like these, PopLatin offers a radically revised view of what literature and beliefs ordinary laypeople could access during the centuries before the European Reformation. 

These objectives will be achieved through: literary analysis of four case studies, to establish how these Latin texts popularised the contemplative teachings of medieval authorities; analysis of material evidence, to show how priests communicated the teachings in their books to laypeople; survey of Latin priests’ literature, assisted by AI, to contextualise my research in wider trends; and literary analysis of the influence of Latin priests’ books on writers more famous today, to establish their importance for cultural history.