I trained at the University of Exeter: a BA in English Medieval Studies followed by a PhD on popular culture and the medieval English romance narratives.

I teach and lecture primarily later medieval and Tudor literature. I convene three 2nd year literature modules, including Writing Society 1380-1580, and offer the final year options English Reformed: Early Renaissance Writing 1485-1575 and (from 2012-13) English Drama before Shakespeare. I am part of the teaching team for the MA in English Literature| and the Medieval Studies MPhil(B) programme|, which I also occasionally convene.

I supervise MA, MPhil and PhD students on literary and cross-disciplinary subjects. Recent students have worked on:

• ‘The political appropriation of John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes: a manuscript study of British Library, MS Harley 1766’ (PhD)
• ‘Asceticism in late-medieval religious writing: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 114’ (PhD)
• ‘A revelation of purgatory to ane holy woman (1422).’ (MPhil)
• ‘Magical rings in Middle English Romance: an interdisciplinary study’ (MPhil)
• ‘The medieval house and curtilage: domestic spaces in the English medieval romance’ (MPhil)
• ‘Literary representations of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in the sixteenth century’ (MA)

I welcome enquiries from prospective graduate students looking to work in the following areas: inscriptions, medieval English textual and vernacular cultures, art and culture of the medieval English parish church, late-medieval devotional and mystical writing, religious and secular iconographic traditions, romance genre and the culture of chivalry, Tudor writing (esp. religious) the impact of the Reformation on artistic production, antiquaries and antiquarianis.

My research activity is cross-disciplinary with a strong accent upon exploring links between textual, artistic and material cultures in England in the medieval and early modern periods. For the last few years I have been developing related projects on the large and, for the most part, unstudied body of vernacular inscriptions produced in England between the Conquest and the Tudor reformations. These are, essentially, texts produced for display in public and domestic contexts and the corpus extends to thousands of extant and lost inscriptions in a host of languages, mostly English but also various kinds of insular French, Cornish, Welsh, Dutch, and Hebrew. This research has led to related interests in antiquaries, notably John Weever (1576-1632). Much of my work is focused on the art and devotional cultures of the English parish church.

Research groups

I am active in the research networks that bring together Birmingham medievalists in the College of Arts and Law, including the Medieval English Research Group and the Centre of Study of the Middle Ages. 

I am a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and am involved in societies and organizations concerned with the preservation and understanding of medieval literary, artistic and material cultures. I am an active member of The Church Monuments Society  and of The Monumental Brass Society (The MBS archive is housed in the Special Collections department in the main University of Birmingham library.) I'm also a member of The Suffolk Records Society, The Norfolk Churches Trust, the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History, and the Oxfordshire Architectural and Historical Society.

I'm a member of The Early English Text Society, and I sit on the advisory board of the Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures.

I regularly give papers at conferences and seminars, including, in 2010-11:

• Harlaxton Medieval Symposium
• Queen’s University, Belfast, ‘Geographies of Orthodoxy: Mapping Late Medieval Lives of Christ,’ conference
• University of Liverpool, Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ‘Text And Place’ symposium

• The Material Word. Vernacular Inscriptions in Late Medieval England, Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe 15 (forthcoming, Brepols)
• 'A living language of the dead? French commemorative inscriptions on fifteenth-century English monuments.' In The Yorkist Age, ed. Hannes Kleineke and Christian Steer, Harlaxton Medieval Studies, XXIII (forthcoming, Shaun Tyas)
• ‘The seven works of mercy in the parish church: the development of a vernacular tradition.’ In Patrons and Professionals, ed. Paul Binski and Elizabeth New, Harlaxton Medieval Studies XXII (in press, Shaun Tyas)
• ‘On looking at holy windows: an English Passion cycle window at St Kew, Cornwall.’ In "Diuerse Imaginaciouns of Cristes Life": Devotional Cultures in England and Beyond, 1300-1560', ed. Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry (in press, Brepols)
• ‘A newly identified verse item by John Lydgate at Holy Trinity church, Long Melford, Suffolk.’ Notes and Queries, 58: 3 (2011), 364-67 [http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/content/58/3/364.full.pdf+html]
• Chaucer to Spenser: An Anthology of Writings, 2^nd edition [with Stephen Kelly, Queen’s University, Belfast] (forthcoming, Wiley-Blackwell)
• Six English Parish Churches [with Rachel Canty]. In The English Parish Church Through the Centuries, Interactive DVD, gen. ed. Dee Dyas (York University, Centre for Christianity & Culture, 2010) http://www.york.ac.uk/projects/christianityandculture/
• ‘Medieval literature.’ In The English Literature Companion, ed. Julian Wolfreys, Palgrave Student Companions Series (Palgrave, 2010), 72-80
• ‘English Commemorative Inscriptions: Some Literary Dimensions.’ In Memory and Commemoration in Medieval England, ed. Caroline M. Barron and Clive Burgess, Harlaxton Medieval Studies XX (Shaun Tyas, 2010), 251-70
• ‘The visual history of Guy of Warwick.’ In Guy of Warwick, Icon and Ancestor, ed. Rosalind Field and Alison Wiggins (Brewer, 2007), 110-32
• ‘Owners and copyists of John Rous’s armorial rolls.’ In Essays in Manuscript Geography: Vernacular Manuscripts of the English West Midlands from the Conquest to the Sixteenth Century, ed. Wendy Scase (Brepols, 2007), 203-28
• ‘Visual Culture.’ In Chaucer: An Oxford Guide, ed. Steve Ellis (Oxford UP, 2005), 190-207
• ‘A portrait of the reader: donors and their books in late-medieval church art.’ In Imagining the Book, ed. Stephen Kelly and John Thompson, Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, 7 (Brepols, 2005), 323-54
• ‘The reception of Continental women mystics in fifteenth and sixteenth England: some artistic evidence.’ In The Medieval Mystical Tradition VII, ed. Eddie Jones (Brewer, 2004), 97-117