The hunting and heraldry compilation known as The Boke of Saint Albans, printed in 1486, included in its 1496 edition the Treatyse of Fysshynge with…
Because of my work on medieval oysters, people have sent me, for years now, the same image of an angry medieval oyster. There it is,…
William Dunbar’s “My ladye with the mekle lippis,” is a parodic insult poem, possibly directed at Elen More or the other Black woman at the…
The copy of the King of Tars in the Auchinleck manuscript opens with a rare illustration, rare in that it’s in the manuscript at all…
Fredric Jameson’s chapter “On Interpretation: Literature as a Socially Symbolic Act” from his The Political Unconscious returns often, and surprisingly, to the Middle Ages. As he argues…
Here is sample presentation. Note that I quickly summarize Orlemanski’s argument, provide a key quote, and then connect her work to my own research interests,…
The Bibliothèque royale de Belgique in Brussels has newly posted many digitized manuscripts. This link might work. I poked at a manuscript of Jean Miélot’s…
Harrison Bergeron is Black. I don’t mean that the story says he is, explicitly. But it doesn’t say he’s white either. All we know about…
The new Emma film, by Autumn de Wilde, is notable for its two butts. As the first is Mr. Knightley’s, and the second Emma’s, we…