My research, as with my teaching, reaches outwards conceptually and historically from the early Middle Ages. Starting with literature written in Old English and Anglo-Latin between the years 600 and 1100, I am interested in studying oversized social and affective phenomena—friendship, secrecy, gesture—through fine-grained readings and archival research across a wide range of sources and objects: from laws to monastic rules, poetry to visual art, architecture to cryptography. I also try to understand the imp
My first book, Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), investigates the tensions between the medieval Christian belief in divine omniscience and the social experience of secrecy. I argue that as these tensions manifested in the legal culture and monastic life of early medieval England, they profoundly shaped the practices of literary interpretation during the period. This book was supported by several grants
In a similar vein, I am also interested in the ways the Middle Ages has influenced the intellectual commitments of more recent eras. I recently published Thinking of the Medieval: Midcentury Intellectuals and the Middle Ages (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022), co-edited with R. D. Perry and featuring an afterword by Martin Jay. This collection of essays illuminates the enduring and influential engagements with the Middle Ages that emerged in the twentieth century. By tracing the ways that intellectual figures