After studying for an undergraduate degree in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Cambridge, Nick moved into the later medieval period for his graduate research, which centred around the early fifteenth-century bureaucrat, poet and melancholic Thomas Hoccleve. He still works on aspects of Hoccleve’s writing and political literature in the late middle ages. His other research interests include manuscripts and readers of Middle English poetry, the uses that medieval writers made of the Bible, and a current major project on gifts and narratives in the medieval period. Nick curated an exhibition at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, called The Romance of the Middle Ages, and hosted the 2012 Romance in Medieval Britain conference. He is also interested in modern creative responses to the medieval past.
Teaching
Nick holds a joint (so-called CUF) appointment with the Faculty of English, where he is Associate Professor in Medieval English literature. As a Tutorial Fellow at St Hugh’s Nick teaches English literature and language from the Anglo-Saxon period to the sixteenth century. He also teaches aspects of language history and critical theory. In 2012 Nick was given a Teaching Excellence Award by the University of Oxford.
Selected publications
- ‘ “Heer Y die in thy presence”: The Rewriting of Martyrs in and after Hoccleve’, The Review of English Studies 69 (2018), 13–31
- Medieval Romance and Material Culture, ed. Nicholas Perkins (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2015)
- The Romance of the Middle Ages (written with Alison Wiggins; Oxford: Bodleian Publications, 2012)
- ‘Ekphrasis and Narrative in Emaré and Sir Eglamour of Artois‘, in Medieval Romance, Medieval Contexts, ed. Rhiannon Purdie and Michael Cichon (Cambridge: Brewer, 2011), pp. 47–60
- ‘Biblical Allusion and Prophetic Authority in Gildas’s De excidio Britanniae’, The Journal of Medieval Latin 20 (2010), 78–112
- ‘Writing, Authority, and Bureaucracy‘, in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature, ed. Greg Walker and Elaine Treharne (Oxford: OUP, 2010), pp. 68–89
- Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination (ed. with David Clark; Cambridge: Brewer, 2010)
- ‘Haunted Hoccleve? The Regiment of Princes, the Troilean Intertext, and Conversations with the Dead‘, Chaucer Review 43 (2008), 103–39
- ‘Thomas Hoccleve: La Male Regle‘, in A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, c.1350–1500, ed. Peter Brown (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007)
- ‘Reading the Bible in Sawles Warde and Ancrene Wisse’, Medium Ævum 72 (2003), 207–37
- ‘Representing Advice in Lydgate’, in The Lancastrian Court, ed. Jenny Stratford (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2003), pp. 173–91
- Hoccleve’s ‘Regiment of Princes’: Counsel and Constraint (Cambridge: Brewer, 2001)
- Learn more about Medieval Studies at Oxford and Medieval English at Oxford
