Professor Daniel Wakelin

My post, the Jeremy Griffiths Professorship of Medieval English Palaeography, is supported by the generosity of the late John and Jeanne Griffiths, in memory of their son, the great scholar of manuscripts, Jeremy Griffiths. Mr and Mrs Griffiths also kindly endowed a studentship each year for the MSt. in English 650-1550. I teach for that MSt. and for various undergraduate papers. Some work by former MSt. students was published as a book: it is a set of their transcriptions of Revolting Remedies from the Middle Ages.

In my research, I study manuscripts and early printed copies of English literature, primarily from the 1100s to the 1500s, especially of humanist and learned literature; everyday pragmatic literacy; Chaucerian traditions; and carols and interludes. I combine palaeography and codicology with literary criticism in order to recover the creative agency of authors, scribes and readers alike. I discuss some scribal creativity in this lecture.

My publications include:

• Immaterial Texts in Late Medieval England: Making English Literary Manuscripts, 1400-1500 (discussed in this blog post and this talk online)
• the exhibition Designing English: Graphics on the Medieval Page and its accompanying catalogue (discussed in this video)
• Scribal Correction and Literary Craft: English Manuscripts 1375-1510 (joint winner of the DeLong Prize for book history in 2015)
• Humanism, Reading and English Literature 1430-1530

I have also co-edited some English texts:

• William Worcester's political treatise The Boke of Noblesse (with Catherine Nall)
• a Middle English translation from Petrarch (completing an edition by Edward Wilson)

and a collection of essays called The Production of Books in England 1350-1500.

Outside Oxford, I am the executive secretary of the Early English Text Society and one of the editors of The Review of English Studies and Cambridge University Press's Studies in Medieval Literature.