Notes on Contributors
Aidan Conti
is Professor in Medieval Philology at the University of Bergen where he is presently co-ordinator for the Research Group in Medieval Philology. His publications explore medieval Latin in Scandinavia, medieval homiletics, and the manuscript contexts for the Homiliary of Angers. His research on editorial methods led to his serving on the editorial team for the Handbook of Stemmatology: History, Methodology, Digital Approaches (2020), for which he wrote a chapter on the typology of variants.
Robert Getz
is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto and co-editor of the Dictionary of Old English. He has published on Old English language and literature in journals such as Anglia, the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, and Studia Neophilologica.
Thomas N. Hall
writes mainly on Old English and Medieval Latin sermons and apocrypha. His edited books include Via Crucis: Essays on Early Medieval Sources and Ideas in Memory of J. E. Cross; Source of Wisdom: Old English and Early Medieval Latin Studies in Honour of Thomas D. Hill; and Anglo-Saxon Books and Their Readers: Essays in Celebration of Helmut Gneuss’s ‘Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts.’ He has taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Notre Dame and is presently a researcher on the Electronic Corpus of Anonymous Homilies in Old English project at the University of Göttingen.
Susan Irvine
is Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London. She is the author of Old English Homilies from MS Bodley 343 (1993) and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle MS E (2004), and co-author (with Malcolm Godden) of The Old English Boethius (2009) (winner of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists ‘Best Edition’ Prize), and The Old English Boethius with Verse Prologues and Epilogues (2012). She is President of the Society of Teachers of Old English in Britain and Ireland, and serves on various international Advisory Boards and Councils. In 2015 she was awarded an Anneliese Maier Research Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Esther Lemmerz
is a doctoral candidate and researcher at the Electronic Corpus of Anonymous Homilies in Old English project at the University of Göttingen, where she also teaches Old and Middle English literature and culture. Currently, she is finishing a doctoral dissertation on Latin quotations in anonymous Old English homilies and saints’ lives. She holds master’s degrees in Medieval Studies from the University of Leeds and University of Bonn. Her research focuses on Old English homilies and saints’ lives, including their composition and transmission as well as their Latin sources. She is particularly interested in Old English-Latin bilingualism in early medieval England.
Stephen Pelle
is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto and an Editor at the Dictionary of Old English. His current research focuses on the Latin sources of Old and early Middle English homilies, a topic on which he is now writing a monograph. He has also published on Latin and Old Norse preaching texts, as well as on the Old Saxon Heliand and the circulation of the biblical apocrypha in the medieval West.
Thijs Porck
is an Assistant Professor of Medieval English at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, teaching Old English, Middle English, Tolkien and Medieval studies. He has published widely on Old English textual criticism, Beowulf, the fiction and scholarship of J. R. R. Tolkien, the history of Old English studies as well as early medieval notions of old age. He is a cultural historian of early medieval England, with a background in medieval history as well as English language and literature. His latest monograph Old Age in Early Medieval England: A Cultural History (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2019) is the first book-length study of the cultural conceptualisation of growing old in Anglo-Saxon England. Multidisciplinary in approach, this book makes use of a wide variety of sources, ranging from the visual arts to hagiography, homiletic literature, and heroic poetry.
Winfried Rudolf
is Professor of Medieval English Language and Literature at the University of Göttingen. He is an expert on European palaeography before the year 1200 and specializes in Insular manuscripts of that period. Other interests include the study of medieval liturgical practices, homiletic literature, digital editing, and the recovery of hitherto unknown manuscript sources. He is the director of the Vercelli School of Medieval European Palaeography (VSMEP), an international education project that teaches ancillary skills in the historical disciplines to international students and contributes to the preservation of cultural heritage. He is also the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project Electronic Corpus of Anonymous Homilies in Old English and Honorary Visiting Professor at University College London from 2015–2020.
Donald G. Scragg
has been a member of staff in the Department of English at the University of Manchester for over forty years (with brief periods of secondment to the Universities of Cambridge, Colombia-Missouri and Connecticut). He is the founding father of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies (MANCASS), and Teachers of Old English in Britain and Ireland (TOEBI), and established the Toller Memorial lecture series. Professor Scragg’s published work includes editions of Old English poetry and prose, notably The Battle of Maldon and The Vercelli Homilies and Related Texts, and many collections of essays by others, including a number in the MANCASS Publications series. He has also written extensively on aspects of manuscripts containing Old English, an interest which culminated in A Conspectus of Scribal Hands Writing English, 960–1100, of which he is currently producing a second edition.
Robert K. Upchurch
is Professor of English at the University of North Texas. His recent work concentrates on Old English homilies, particularly those of Ælfric of Eynsham, and sermon manuscripts from Anglo-Saxon England. He has recently completed a study of two Old English homilies and the liturgical rites they accompany, and he is currently working with a colleague on editions and translations of fifteen homilies and eight occasional pieces by Ælfric.
Jonathan Wilcox
is Professor of English and Collegiate Fellow at the University of Iowa, where he specializes in medieval literature and culture. He has published widely on Old English literature, particularly on homilies, manuscripts, and on emotions and gestures. He is currently struggling with the idea of humour, as seen in the recent essays, “Understatement and Incongruity: Humour in the Literature of Anglo-Saxon England,” in Humour in the Arts: New Perspectives, ed. Vivienne Westbrook and Shun-liang Chao (New York: Routledge, 2019), pp. 59–77, and “Humour and the Exeter Book Riddles: Incongruity in Feþegeorn (R. 31),” in Riddles at Work in the Early Medieval Tradition: Words, Ideas, Interactions, ed. Megan Cavell and Jennifer Neville (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020).
Charles D. Wright
is Professor emeritus of English and Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is author of The Irish Tradition in Old English Literature and Manuscripts in Austria and Germany (Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimile 24), several edited collections, and many articles on Old English poetry and prose, especially on the sources of anonymous homilies, as well as on biblical apocrypha and Hiberno-Latin literature. He is currently editing the Latin and Old English versions of The Apocalypse of Thomas.
Samantha Zacher
is Professor of English and Medieval Studies at Cornell University. Her research focuses on Old English homilies and biblical literature, and on forms of anti-Judaism in pre-modernity. Her books include Rewriting the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon Verse: Becoming the Chosen People (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013); and Preaching the Converted: the Style and Rhetoric of the Vercelli Book Homilies (University of Toronto Press, 2009). She has also edited Imagining the Jew in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2016); and co-edited A Companion to British Literature (4 vols.) with Robert DeMaria and Jr., Heesok Chang (Wiley Blackwell, 2014), and New Readings in the Vercelli Book with Andy Orchard (University of Toronto Press, 2009). She is currently working on a new monograph about conceptions of Jewish disease and contagion from Antiquity to Early Modernity.