Fiona Somerset

Professor of English, Co-Director of Medieval Studies

Fiona has recently published Feeling Like Saints, a monograph on the writings of the lollard movement, and a collection of essays on medieval popular culture, Truth and Tales: Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media (with Nicholas Watson). Her forthcoming pieces include a short essay on “Masculinity and its Metonyms,” a long survey article on lollard writings, and a kite flown for her new book: “Before and After Wyclif: consent to another’s sin in medieval Europe.”

She is researching a new book on medieval social consent from 1100-1500: recent and upcoming lecture topics drawn from this work include Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, Anglo-Norman political poems, Mum and the Sothsegger, verses in canon law manuscripts in Italy, France, England, and Bohemia; Lawman’s Brut, Wyclif’s and lollard adaptations of canon law on consent; the Hussite defense of the Four Articles at the Council of Basel (1433), and Stephen Langton’s Letter to the English People.

She has also recently been asked to speak on panels about medieval emotions, Jacques Le Goff, editorial emendation, and memory and the archive.