Diane Watt FLSW is a British medievalist, currently Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Surrey. She previously held a personal chair at Aberystwyth University, where she was Deputy Director of the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (IMEMS). She was Charles A. Owen Jr. Distinguished Visiting Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Connecticut in 2005. [1] She was awarded a Snell Exhibition to study at Balliol College, University of Oxford, [2] and was awarded her DPhil in English Literature in 1993. She is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. [3]
Watt is the author of three important books on late medieval women's writing: Secretaries of God, Medieval Women's Writing and Women, Writing and Religion. She has also written a study of the work of Chaucer's friend and literary executor John Gower, entitled Amoral Gower which received critical praise in the journal Speculum . [4] She was awarded the John Hurt Fisher Prize for "significant contribution to the field of John Gower Studies" in 2004. [5] She has also published an edition of the letters of the Paston women, [6] and has edited and co-edited a number of other works.
The Lesbian Premodern, which she co-edited with Noreen Giffney and Michelle M. Sauer [7] was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in the LGBT Anthology category. [8] Watt was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship [Note 1] in 2016 for her project "Women's Literary Culture Before the Conquest". [9] From 2015-2017 she led the Leverhulme-funded international research network, "Women's Literary Culture and the Medieval English Canon". [10]
John Gower was an English poet, a contemporary of William Langland and the Pearl Poet, and a personal friend of Geoffrey Chaucer. He is remembered primarily for three major works—the Mirour de l'Omme, Vox Clamantis, and Confessio Amantis—three long poems written in French, Latin, and English respectively, which are united by common moral and political themes.
The Paston Letters is a collection of correspondence between members of the Paston family of Norfolk gentry and others connected with them in England between the years 1422 and 1509. The collection also includes state papers and other important documents.
Confessio Amantis is a 33,000-line Middle English poem by John Gower, which uses the confession made by an ageing lover to the chaplain of Venus as a frame story for a collection of shorter narrative poems. According to its prologue, it was composed at the request of Richard II. It stands with the works of Chaucer, Langland, and the Pearl poet as one of the great works of late 14th-century English literature. The Index of Middle English Verse shows that in the era before the printing press it was one of the most-often copied manuscripts along with Canterbury Tales and Piers Plowman.
Margaret Bent CBE, is an English musicologist who specializes in music of the late medieval and Renaissance eras. In particular, she has written extensively on the Old Hall Manuscript, English masses as well as the works of Johannes Ciconia and John Dunstaple.
Clifford J. Rogers is a professor of history at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He has also been a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Swansea University, an Olin Fellow in Military and Strategic History at Yale, and a Fulbright Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research in London.
Jay Rubenstein is an American historian of the Middle Ages.
Anne Middleton was an American medievalist, and the Florence Green Bixby Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.
William Paston, the only son of Clement Paston and Beatrice Somerton, had a distinguished career as a lawyer and Justice of the Common Pleas. He acquired considerable property, and is considered "the real founder of the Paston family fortunes".
Sir George Browne was an English politician. He was the eldest surviving son and heir of Sir Thomas Browne, beheaded 20 July 1460. He took part in Buckingham's rebellion, and was beheaded on Tower Hill on 4 December 1483.
Wendy Scase is Emeritus Geoffrey Shepherd Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Birmingham. Her research interests include medieval manuscript production and use; histories of literacy; and relations between medieval literature and law, politics, and religion.
Sarah Helen Prescott FLSW is Professor of English Literature at Aberystwyth University and a non-fiction writer, specializing in the history of Welsh literature in English. She is also the director of the university's Institute of Literature, Languages and Creative Arts (ILLCA).
Jane Chance, also known as Jane Chance Nitzsche, is an American scholar specializing in medieval English literature, gender studies, and J. R. R. Tolkien. She spent most of her career at Rice University, where since her retirement she has been the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor Emerita in English.
Laura Ashe FRHistS is a British historian of English medieval literature, history and culture. She lectures in English and is a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford.
Alastair J. Minnis is a Northern Irish literary critic and historian of ideas who has written extensively about medieval literature, and contributed substantially to the study of late-medieval theology and philosophy. Having gained a first-class B.A. degree at the Queen's University of Belfast, he matriculated at Keble College, Oxford as a visiting graduate student, where he completed work on his Belfast Ph.D., having been mentored by M.B. Parkes and Beryl Smalley. Following appointments at the Queen's University of Belfast and Bristol University, he was appointed Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of York; also Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies and later Head of English & Related Literature. From 2003 to 2006, he was a Humanities Distinguished Professor at Ohio State University, Columbus, from where he moved to Yale University. In 2008, he was named Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of English at Yale.
Bruce W. Holsinger is an American author, novelist, and an academic and literary scholar. Currently, he is professor of English at the University of Virginia.
Sebastian Sobecki is a medievalist specialising in English literature, history, and manuscript studies.
Bonnie J. Morris is an American scholar of women's studies. She completed a PhD in women's history at Binghamton University in 1989 and has taught at various universities including Georgetown University, George Washington University, and University of California, Berkeley.
Jane Geddes is a British art historian and academic, specialising in Scottish architecture, British Medieval manuscripts, Pictish sculpture and Medieval decorative ironwork. She is Emeritus Professor of Art History, University of Aberdeen.
Lisa M. C. Weston is a scholar of medieval literature and Old English language. She teaches at Fresno State Department of English, and served as interim chair of the department in 2019.
Kathryn Bond Stockton is an American writer and academic. She works at the University of Utah, where she serves as the inaugural Dean of the School for Cultural and Social Transformation and a Distinguished Professor of English. Her primary research areas are "queer theory, theories of race and racialized gender, and twentieth-century literature and film."