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Fiona Somerset, Associate Professor, English

Contact Info:

Office Location:	316A Allen
Office Phone:	(919) 684-5275
Email Address:

Office Hours:

Tuesdays 1:00-4:00pm and Wednesdays by appointment

Education:

Ph.D.	Cornell University	1995
Visiting student	Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford	1994
Visiting student	Clare Hall, Cambridge	1993
M.A.	Cornell University	1993
A.B. with Special Honours	University of Chicago	1990
degree credit applied to U. of Chicago A.B.	Cleveland Institute of Music	1988

Specialties:

Medieval Literature
British Literature

Research Interests: Medieval Literature

Fiona Somerset works on medieval English literature and culture: special areas of interest include the Lollard heresy, medieval English Latinity and its role in vernacular culture, and medieval forms of popular narrative and concepts of the popular reader. She has written about Chaucer, Piers Plowman, numerous Lollard and anti-Lollard writings, Trevisa, Lydgate, Margery Kempe, etc., and is the author of Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England (Cambridge U.P., 1998) as well as articles in essay collections and in journals including English Literary History, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, and Mediaeval Studies. She has edited two essay collections: The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Post-Medieval Vernacularity (with Nicholas Watson), and Lollards and their Influence (with Jill Havens and Derrick Pitard). Work in progress includes an edition of four Lollard dialogues, as well as a new book about late medieval competition for lay readerships. She is co-editor of The Yearbook of Langland Studies.

Areas of Interest:

-Middle English prose and poetry, especially Piers Plowman and its tradition, Wycliffite texts, Chaucer
-Theory and methodology of late-medieval cultural studies (including paleography, codicology, bibliography, textual criticism)
-Medieval Latin, particularly philosophical and polemical texts

Keywords:

Europe • Britain • Medieval • Literature • Lollard

Current Ph.D. Students   (Former Students)

• Whitney A. Trettien  
• Alejandra Rodriguez  
• Sarah M. McLaughlin  
• Lauren Pawlak  
• Jill M Sirko  
• Sarah Griffin  
• William F Revere  
• Sarah E Rogers  

Representative Publications   (More Publications)

1. Four Wycliffite Dialogues (2009), EETS 333, Oxford U P (Critical edition of four previously unpublished Middle English texts complete with manuscript descriptions, analysis of dialects, critical apparatus, extensive explanatory notes, and glossary.)
2. F. Somerset, Afterword, in Wycliffite Controversies, edited by Mishtooni Bose and J. Patrick Hornbeck II (2011), pp. 319-33, Brepols
3. F. Somerset, Censorship, in The Production of Books in England, 1350-1530, edited by Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin (2010), pp. 239-58, Cambridge University Press
4. ‘Hard is with seyntis for to make affray:’ Lydgate the Poet-Propagandist as Hagiographer, in John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture and Lancastrian England, edited by Lawrence Scanlon and James Simpson (Spring, 2006), University of Notre Dame Press
5. ‘Al þe comonys with on voys at onys’: Multilingual Latin and Vernacular Voice in Piers Plowman, edited by Andrew Cole, Fiona Somerset, and Lawrence Warner, Yearbook of Langland Studies, vol. 19 (2006), pp. 107-36, Medieval Institute Publications  [abs]
6. Wycliffite Spirituality, edited by Helen Barr and Anne Hutchinson, Text and Controversy in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Anne Hudson (January, 2005), pp. 375-86
7. The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity, edited by Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson (2003), Penn State U P
8. Excitative Speech: Theories of Emotive Response from Richard Fitzralph to Margery Kempe, in The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious Literature, edited by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Warren (2002), pp. 59-79, Palgrave
9. Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 37 (1998), Cambridge U P