Academic Reading Circles are an innovative strategy for supporting students’ academic reading practices. Based on reading circles used in more general contexts to develop students’ engagement with reading extensively, Academic Reading Circles have been adapted to the academic context to help students engage with more complex texts in their discipline. This paper will consider how Academic Reading Circles can play a strategic role in students becoming well read or in their learning process of reading...

Heinrich von Kempten is a poem by Konrad von Würzburg, an author active in southern Germany in the middle decades of the thirteenth century. It raises interesting questions about knightly values, legal and feudal obligations and courtly behaviour, and is thus potentially interesting to anyone studying or teaching medieval society or chivalry. This publication presents an English translation of the poem (together with linguistic and historical notes) which is placed alongside the standard edition of...

The old adage has it that ‘the Nile is Egypt, and Egypt is the Nile’, a statement which was never truer than in the medieval period. Almost all cultivation — and consequently, settlement — in Egypt was located within a mile either side of the river’s main channel, or in the Delta into which it split north of Cairo. The fertility of these cultivated areas depended on the level of the Nile’s annual flooding, which...

This study is as much a work of theology as it is a literary analysis of the poems found in MS Cotton Nero A.x. The Gawain-poet’s detailed delight in the material has led many to consider the poems a celebration of the wealthy and powerful in courtly life. Cecilia Hatt’s aim is to rescue the theology of the poet from this position and demonstrate how each poem represents a ‘coherent religious vision’ (p. 1), which...

A Journal of Ancient Theatre

This article examines the textual history of a treatise in Anglo-Norman French containing instructions for meditation during mass directed at the laity. The treatise has received scarce previous study. The article consists of a thorough study of the treatise’s textual history, which includes its frequent abridgement and excerption, and mistaken listing as three separate texts in Dean (720–22), as well as brief observations on the treatise’s language. It further provides a best-text edition of the...

Vilmundar saga viðutan is a ‘late’ saga, probably written in the fourteenth century and preserved in over fifty MSS of the fifteenth century or later. This good new edition of a ‘legendary romance’ (p. vi) can be seen as part of a recent flourishing of interest in fornaldarsǫgur and riddarasǫgur (‘sagas of ancient times’ and ‘sagas of knights’), until recently looked down on as low-grade fantasies inferior to the earlier ‘classic’ family sagas and kings’...

Leeds Medieval Studies is a free-access journal, published in print and online, and welcomes submissions reflecting the full intellectual range of the interdisciplinary Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds, including history, art, literature, and language in the period circa 500–1500 CE, and their reflexes in later medievalism.

PGR Helen Robinson talks to Dr James Simpson about his new academic role in Hong Kong which has opened up interesting research opportunities. James’ areas of expertise comprise, inter alia, language education and migration, adult ESOL, multilingualism, and language education and development. Covering some of these areas in the context of challenges posed by moving countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, this conversation offers insights into work-life dynamics in strangely different circumstances. With an interdisciplinary audience...

Representing War and Violence 1250–1600, edited by Joanna Bellis and Laura Slater, brings together nine essays from a range of disciplines, from literary criticism to art history, together with a scholarly introduction. The introduction grapples with the philosophical and epistemological problems associated with ‘representing’ historical phenomena, and violence in particular, as well as introducing the essays themselves. The volume is divided into three, loosely thematic sections: Ethics and Aesthetics; Debating and Narrating; Experiencing, Representing and...

Mary Swan (18 December 1963–19 October 2020) was Director of Studies in the Leeds Institute for Medieval Studies from 1996 to 2011. Mary’s path into Medieval Studies began with her matriculation at Keele University in 1981, where she took a BA in French and English. Mary was thrilled by the works she encountered during these studies, among them Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. She spent her third year working in Brittany, where she made...

TEALfest was a week-long “online festival for sharing technology enhanced active learning practice, research, ideas and experiences”, organised and facilitated by the University of Warwick’s Learning Design Consultancy Unit in May 2021 (University of Warwick, 2021). The festival consisted of a series of 41 events led by colleagues and guest speakers, focused on the theme of ‘Beyond the bubble’. The organisers aimed to expand their horizons and look for inspiration outside their own practice, disciplines,...

In this paper, I intend to share my experiences and reflections on the process of how the organisational elites, the gatekeepers and the participants of my study, were accessed and interviewed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The three-fold objectives of this paper are: negotiating access, the strategic approaches implemented by me as the researcher in accessing and conducting interviews, and sharing my lessons with novice researchers, who work in similar contexts. In the discussion, an emphasis...

Flaying in the Pre-Modern World contributes to a burgeoning conversation in historical research: skin studies. Building on previous works in this field such as those undertaken by Stephen Connor, Katie L Walter and Sarah Kay, this edited collection stands out from previous studies by examining literal acts of flaying through the laws and tools relating to the body to create a ‘more textured understanding’ of the skin and its history (p. 4). In the introduction,...

Peter Sawyer is perhaps best known as a scholar of the Vikings and their activities. It was, however, as an Anglo-Saxonist that he first established himself. Born, brought up, and educated in Oxford (apart from a short time during the Second World War when he lived with relatives in Milford Haven), he studied at Jesus College, from 1948 to 1951. After obtaining his BA he secured a Research Studentship at the University of Manchester. He...

The Old English riddles of the Exeter Book have been the subject of a welcome deluge of ecocritically-minded research in recent years. The most distinctive contribution of Dale’s The Natural World in the Exeter Book Riddles is that she brings (Christian) ecotheology to bear on her analyses. This is welcome: until researchers started, in the wake of early ecocritical research, to realise that Old English riddles are a fabulous repository of insights into the relationships...

A diiron(II) complex has been crystallised in three different helicate conformations, which differ in the torsions of the butane-1,4-diyl ligand linker groups. The crystals exhibit a range of spin state properties, including stepwise spin-crossover of the two iron atoms. A related ligand with a rigid pyrid-2,6-diyl spacer forms more a distorted, high-spin diiron(II) helicate structure.