Nick teaches and researches medieval English Literature.
After studying for an undergraduate degree in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Cambridge, he 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. Nick’s other research interests include manuscripts and readers of Middle English poetry, the uses that medieval writers made of the Bible, and modern creative responses to the medieval past. Recently, he has been working on gifts, objects and narratives in the medieval period – the subject of his book The gift of narrative in medieval England.
Nick is the curator of a major Bodleian Library exhibition in 2023, called Gifts and Books, and has been working on a number of projects connected to it, including Creative Story Exchange, in collaboration with Oxford Health Arts Partnership.
Teaching
Nick holds a joint appointment with the Faculty of English, where he is Professor of Medieval Literature. As a Tutorial Fellow at St Hugh’s, Nick teaches English Literature and Language from the early Middle Ages to the sixteenth century. He also teaches aspects of language history and critical theory. He is the recipient of a Teaching Excellence Award from the University of Oxford.
Selected publications
- (ed.) Gifts and Books: From Early Myth to the Present (Bodleian Publications, 2023)
- The gift of narrative in medieval England (Manchester University Press, 2021; paperback 2023)
- ‘ “Heer Y die in thy presence”: The Rewriting of Martyrs in and after Hoccleve’, The Review of English Studies 69 (2018), 13–31
- (ed.) Medieval Romance and Material Culture(D.S. Brewer, 2015)
- The Romance of the Middle Ages (written with Alison Wiggins; Bodleian Publications, 2012)
- ‘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 (OUP, 2010), pp. 68–89
- Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination (ed. with David Clark; Brewer, 2010)
- ‘Haunted Hoccleve? The Regiment of Princes, the Troilean Intertext, and Conversations with the Dead‘,Chaucer Review 43 (2008), 103–39
- ‘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 (Shaun Tyas, 2003), pp. 173–91
- Hoccleve’s ‘Regiment of Princes’: Counsel and Constraint (Brewer, 2001)
- Learn more about Medieval Studies at Oxford and Medieval English at Oxford
