…And At Least Two Words You Probably Should Know Were NOT Invented By...
There’s a Huffington Post piece making the rounds today titled 13 Words You Probably Didn’t Know Were Invented By Shakespeare. While well meaning, the post is in desperate need of pedantic correction...
View ArticleThe Voice(s) of John Gower: Prose into Sound
One of the completely unanticipated thrills during the publication process for A Burnable Book has come from the world of audiobooks. In all the excitement of production I hadn’t realized that both...
View ArticlePublication Week #1!
We’re just three days out from the UK publication date of A Burnable Book, which will appear on January 30 from HarperCollins, and on February 18 from HarperCollins/William Morrow here in the U.S. (If...
View ArticleUterine Vellum: A Florilegium
I’ve received lots of questions about “the parchment book” in recent weeks so I’m reposting this from about a year ago. The book will be published by the University of Chicago Press in late 2015. Read...
View ArticleA Theft of Love: How Geoffrey Chaucer Stole Valentine’s Day from John Gower
It’s a “fact” well known to students of medieval English literature that Geoffrey Chaucer was the inventor of Valentine’s Day, an attribution made on the basis of a famous line from the Parliament of...
View ArticleChaucer and the Do-Rag
On the eve of publication day, looking for some distraction, I’ve been scanning through the earliest visual depictions of Geoffrey Chaucer, trying to refine a physical description of the poet. We have...
View ArticleChaucer’s Book Launch…and Gower’s Shame
The Troilus Frontispiece, from Cambridge, CCC MS 61 So today is Launch Day, with a party in downtown Charlottesville to celebrate the publication of A Burnable Book. Given the occasion and the setting...
View Article#twittertakeover for @harpercollins
On Friday, while still recovering from the book tour, I’ll be doing a Twitter takeover (hashtag #twittertakeover) for HarperCollins (@harpercollins), tweeting various and sundry Thinges Medievale...
View ArticleHeorot in Vermont: Homage to Booktopia
On the weekend of April 11-13 I traveled to Manchester, Vermont for Booktopia 2014, a three-day celebration of books, reading, and all-around bibliophilia that I can’t recommend highly enough—-it was...
View ArticleCrime Fictions: Premodern/Modern
This fall at UVa I’ll be teaching a senior seminar called “Crime Fictions: Premodern/Modern.” The class will explore the literature of crime in medieval and early modern England, from Chaucer’s...
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