Fiona Somerset Associate Professor
Office Location: 502 Allen
Office Phone: (919) 684-5275
Email Address: somerset@duke.edu
Teaching (Fall, 2009):
- English 110a.01, Introduction to old english
Synopsis
- Allen 326, WF 02:50 PM-04:05 PM
- English 141.01, Chaucer
Synopsis
- Perkins 2-071, WF 08:30 AM-09:45 AM
- English 207a.03, Intro to old english
- Office Hours:
- Wednesday 10-12 and by appointment
- Education and Interests:
- Ph.D., Cornell University
- 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). Her edition of Four Wycliffite Dialogues is awaiting publication by the Early English Text Society. Work in progress includes a monograph on late medieval affect and reading entitled Feeling Like Saints and an article on censorship for a new Cambridge volume on the history of late medieval book production. She is co-editor of The Yearbook of Langland Studies.
- Representative Publications
(More Publications)
- "‘Hard is with seyntis for to make affray:’ Lydgate the Poet-Propagandist as Hagiographer." John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture and Lancastrian England. Ed. Lawrence Scanlon and James Simpson. University of Notre Dame Press, Spring, 2006.
- "Wycliffite Spirituality." Text and Controversy in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Anne Hudson Ed. Helen Barr and Anne Hutchinson. (January, 2005): 375-86.
- Lollards and their Influence in Late Medieval England. Boydell and Brewer, 2003
- "Excitative Speech: Theories of Emotive Response from Richard Fitzralph to Margery Kempe." The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious Literature. Ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Warren. Palgrave, 2002. 59-79.
- The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity. Penn State U P, 2003
- ""Mark him wel for he is on of po"; Training the 'Lewed' Gaze to Discern Hypocrisy." English Literary History 68 (2001): 315-34.
- Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 37 Cambridge U P, 1998.
