MMXVI: a year of blogging

Bliþe Cristmæsse!  I hope you have all enjoyed the holiday period.  With another year coming to an end, I’ve been reflecting on the past year in blogging. I started this blog last year with the intention of (mostly) sticking to my major research topics of Anglo-Saxon prayer, liturgy and medicine.  For the first, I started…

Let your works be dead: the haunting House of Fame

In the summer of 2002, in preparation for my final-year university module on the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, I started reading a rather odd sort of poem.  The House of Fame made little immediate impact on me, other than the image of a magnificent (and truculent) eagle bearing the poet up to the heavens and…

Have mercy on me, O God: Psalm 50 in the Anglo-Saxon church

I have a new article out!  ‘Which Psalms Were Important to the Anglo-Saxons? The Psalms in Tenth- and Eleventh-Century Prayer and Medical Remedies’ is part of a special edition of English Studies on the psalms in Anglo-Saxon and Anglo -Norman England, edited by Helen Appleton and Francis Leneghan, and I am grateful to both of…