RESEARCH INTERESTS

My first monograph, Cushions, Kitchens and Christ, examines the prevalence of domestic imagery in late medieval religious literature. I suggest that this imagery would have been especially potent for fifteenth-century English readers, as the literal household was developing greater and greater cultural capital during this period. All of the texts that I examine in this book are Middle English translations of earlier Latin works, and a key part of my analysis is exploring how translators adapt domestic imagery for their vernacular audiences. In my research, I explore how such writers as Mechtild of Hackeborn, Bridget of Sweden and Nicholas Love use the language of everyday life in the course of communicating their most salient ideas. I am particularly interested in exploring how women readers responded to the language of domesticity and everyday life in the religious literature of later medieval England. 

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More broadly, I am interested in religious reading and culture in late medieval Europe, translation practice, the use of metaphor and allegorical imagery in vernacular religious writing, and reading habits in the later Middle Ages. I am currently planning my next project, on the subject of stranger figures in later medieval English literature, with a particular focus on the positing of Christ as a stranger in fifteenth-century religious writing. 

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