Wakelin, Professor Daniel

Job Title: Jeremy Griffiths Professor of Medieval English Palaeography
College: St Hilda's
Period/ Subject: Medieval; Textual scholarship, bibliography, and book history
Email address: daniel.wakelin@ell.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests:

 I came to Oxford as the Jeremy Griffiths Professor of Medieval English Palaeography from Cambridge, where I was a Junior Research Fellow at St Catharine’s College and then a Fellow and University Lecturer in English at Christ’s College. I’ve also been a Visiting Fellow at the Huntington Library in California and at the University of Connecticut.

I research manuscript and early printed copies of English literature, primarily from the fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries, in order to see what they reveal about writing habits and reading habits and thus about literary and cultural history in general. Within this field, my special interests are scribal corrections, errors and accuracy; marginalia and other ‘genres’ of writing by, for or about readers; humanist reading and scholarship; manuscripts of carols; fifteenth- and sixteenth-century courtly poetry and interludes.

I see palaeography and codicology as advanced forms of close reading – the interpretation of ancient writing’s material form as well as its linguistic content – and thus as continuous with other forms of philological or literary criticism. I've essayed this approach briefly in my chapter of a book I co-edited on The Production of Books in England 1350-1500 (2011) but I’m testing it more fully in a monograph (in progress) about the processes of correcting manuscripts in English from the late fourteenth to the late fifteenth centuries. It’s a study of scribes as themselves close readers: it argues that in their correcting we witness their conscious thought about their craft, written language, literary style, verse form and textual integrity. Rather than explore the social and geographical contexts of scribes’ work, it explores the literary and intellectual aspects of it. The book also supplements the use of case-studies common in Anglophone palaeography with an experiment in quantitative codicology. The balance between counting and close reading, historical overview and critical distinction, is something I hope to explore in further research, into scribal practice. 

An interest in scribal writing as a kind of reading developed from my ongoing interest in the history of reading itself – and the written evidence for that, which I’ve explored in a few articles and in my book on Humanism, Reading and English Literature 1430-1530 (2007). I’ve also conducted other research into humanist literature and its manuscript and printed forms in three forthcoming book-chapters. With Catherine Nall of Royal Holloway I’m currently co-editing a humanist-influenced political treatise, William Worcester's The Boke of Noblesse (1475), and considering a larger scheme to publish more of the little-known humanist works from fifteenth-century England.  

Teaching Areas: In the Faculty of English I primarily teach manuscript studies for the MSt. course in English Language and Literature 650-1550.

Recent Publications:

Among my recent publications are:

 ‘England: Humanism beyond Weiss’, in David Rundle (ed.), Humanism in Fifteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: SSMLL, 2012), 265-306

 ‘Religion, Humanism and Humanity: Chaundler’s Dialogues and the Winchester Secretum’, in Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh (eds.), After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth Century England (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 225-44

‘Caxton’s Exemplar for The Chronicles of England?’, Journal of the Early Book Society, 14 (2011), 55-83

‘Writing the Words’, in Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin (ed.), The Production of Books in England 1350–1500 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 34-58

‘Instructing Readers in Late Medieval Poetic Manuscripts’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 73 (2010), 433-52

‘Maked na moore: Editing and Narrative’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 32 (2010): 365-73

‘Hoccleve and Lydgate’, in Corinne Saunders (ed.), A Companion to Medieval Poetry (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 557-74

with Christopher Burlinson: ‘Evidence for the Construction of Quires from a Fifteenth-Century English Manuscript’, The Library, 7th series, 9 (2008), 383-396

‘Possibilities for Reading: Classical Translations in Parallel Texts ca. 1520–1558’, Studies in Philology, 105 (2008), 463-486

Humanism, Reading, & English Literature 1430–1530 (Oxford University Press, 2007)

‘The Carol in Writing: Three Anthologies from Fifteenth-Century Norfolk’, Journal of the Early Book Society, 9 (2006), 25-49

‘William Worcester Writes a History of his Reading’, New Medieval Literatures, 7 (2005), 53-71

‘Scholarly Scribes and the Creation of Knyghthode and Bataile’, English Manuscript Studies, 12 (2005), 26-45

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