Research Interests for Fiona Somerset

Fiona Somerset is interested in what happens when people read books—and perhaps even more interested in what people imagine might happen if more people were to read books. These interests have led her to work on history of the book, multilingualism, cultural theory, legal history, medieval philosophy, historiography, and the history of emotion. She has written extensively about Wycliffism, or lollardy, a religious reform movement in late medieval England that was persecuted as a heresy. She has also written about Chaucer's poetry, Piers Plowman, the translations of John Trevisa, Lydgate, emotions in mysticism, and Margery Kempe. She is the author of Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England (Cambridge U.P., 1998) and Four Wycliffite Dialogues EETS 333 (Oxford U.P., 2009), and her Classics of Western Spirituality volume on Wycliffite Spirituality (with J. Patrick Hornbeck and Stephen Lahey) is in press. 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). She is now finishing a monograph on the writings of the lollard movement, Feeling Like Saints, and researching a new book on medieval social consent from 1100-1500. She is developing a digital humanities project for the collaborative, comparative study of highly variable texts in manuscript culture, and is co-editor of The Yearbook of Langland Studies.

Keywords:

history of the book, historiography, popular culture, history of emotions, translation, censorship, manuscript culture

Areas of Interest:

-Middle and Old English poetry and prose
-Medieval Latin and French writings, especially in England
-topics including textual cultures and history of the book; history of emotions; multilingualism and translation; theories of popular culture, subculture, and identity, digital humanities

Representative 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 Four Wycliffite Dialogues (2009), EETS 333, Oxford U P (Critical edition of four previously unpublished Middle English texts complete with manuscript descriptions, analysis of dialects, critical apparatus, extensive explanatory notes, and glossary.)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