Dr Daniel Sawyer

I am fascinated by questions about how and why texts work, and how they fitted, or did not fit, into their material and social contexts. I investigate these questions using traditional literary-critical readings, but also other bodies of expertise, chiefly codicology (the systematic study of physical manuscripts) and textual criticism (the study of the transmission of texts and the practice of editing them).

My book, Reading English Verse in Manuscript c.1350–c.1500, offers the first monograph-length history of reading for later Middle English poetry. It is developed from the close consultation of hundreds of surviving medieval manuscripts, and deploys techniques ranging from readings of rhyme to surveys of manuscript weight to establish a new ‘baseline’ picture of the reading of verse at this time. It was published in 2020.

I am pursuing a research project on the manuscripts which do not survive from later medieval England—in fact, most of the manuscripts which once existed. This loss of material is a widely acknowledged hurdle for scholarship, but the missing books have received little attention as a research problem in and of themselves. Many now-lost manuscripts have left small traces of evidence behind, however, and by gathering these on a large scale I believe we can fill in more of the period’s literary and book history. I will also be exploring the ways in which writers and scribes themselves thought about the loss and destruction of books. The first published result of this project is a substantial article titled ‘Missing Books in the Folk Codicology of Later Medieval England’.

Additionally, I am involved in two major textual-critical efforts. First, I am helping to work towards a new edition of the Wycliffite Bible, the first complete English translation of the Bible and the most sophisticated and successful European vernacular Bible translation before print. This work extends a 2016–2019 Arts and Humanities Research Council grant. Second, I am editing Cook’s Tale and the Man of Law’s Tale from The Canterbury Tales a forthcoming Cambridge University Press collection of Chaucer’s works.

I am also writing a short book which considers the strangeness of Middle English verse, and explores the reasons which make us interested in Middle English in the first place.