Dr Ben Parsons

My work focuses on the culture of the later Middle Ages and early modern period, especially the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. I am particularly interested in the popular literature of this period, and in texts which have fallen outside the accepted canon, either by virtue of critical neglect or the marginal status of their authors. This focus also colours my teaching, which is similarly concerned with genres, movements and figures that typically lie outside of conventional definitions of literature, many of which have roots in medieval ideas or traditions.

I have written on various aspects of medieval and early modern culture, ranging from drama, folklore, and education, to mysticism, the supernatural, and the connections between English and continental literature; the main thread running through my work is a focus on texts that have been neglected or undervalued, or are otherwise little-known. These concerns underpin my ongoing interest in textual editing, especially my recent edition of two previously unpublished meditative prayer cycles for Medieval Institute Press. Although these texts have attracted only scant critical and editorial attention, both shed valuable light on overlooked audiences and models of authorship, one being written by an anonymous woman at the behest of a second woman about to enter religious orders, and the other being produced for a lay, urban middle-class readership.

My current research engages with medieval popular culture from the perspective of animal studies, examining the names that medieval people allocated to their pets, working animals and other creatures, in order to establish what these labels might tell us about the ways in which the natural world was characterised in the period. This strand of my work has culminated in the monograph Introducing Medieval Animal Names (forthcoming), which aims to give an accessible and detailed account of the ways in which medieval language engaged with and defined non-human organisms.

Books

• Introducing Medieval Animal Names (University of Wales Press, 2024)
• Two Middle English Prayer Cycles (Medieval Institute Publications, 2023)
• Punishment and Medieval Education (Boydell and Brewer, 2018)
• Comic Drama in the Low Countries, 1400-1560, with Bas Jongenelen (Boydell and Brewer, 2012)

Recent book-chapters

• ‘Popular Tales’, Medieval Poetry 1400-1500, ed. Julia Boffey and A.S.G. Edwards (Oxford University Press, 2023): 371-84.
• ‘Fabliau’ and ‘Folk Tale’, The Chaucer Encyclopedia, gen. ed. Richard Newhauser (Wiley Blackwell, 2023), 2:696-98, 2:729-30.
• ‘Unheimlich Manoeuvres: Freud and the Early Modern Ghost Story’, The Uncanny and the Afterlife of the Gothic, ed. Manuela D’Amore (LCIR, 2021): 11-26.
• ‘Imps of Hell: Young People, Murder and the Early English Press’, Murder Most Foul: Medieval and Early Modern Homicide, ed. Larissa Tracey (Boydell and Brewer, 2018), 434-55.
• ‘Bloody Students: Youth, Corruption and Discipline in the Medieval Classroom’: Blood Matters, ed. Bonnie Landers Johnson and Eleanor Decamp (Penn State UP, 2018), 123-33.
• ‘Satire’, Blackwell Encyclopedia of British Medieval Literature, ed. Sian Echard and Robert Rouse (Wiley Blackwell, 2017): 1652-57.

Recent journal articles

• ‘Slips of the Tongue: Some Overlooked Examples of the Misdirected Kiss Storytelling Motif’, with Bas Jongenelen, Fabula 64 (2023): 282-97.
• ‘Understanding the Blanket-Toss in Medieval Drama: the Case of Een Cluijt van Lijsgen en Jan Lichthart’, with Bas Jongenelen, Medieval English Theatre 44 (2023): 48-90.
• ‘William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat: Some Further Light on Gregory Stremer’, Notes and Queries 69.1 (2022): 85-86.
• ‘“Watte Vocat”: Human and Animal Naming in Gower’s Visio Anglie’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 118.3 (2020): 380-98.
• ‘Trouble at the Mill: Milling, Madness and Merrymaking in the Canterbury Tales’, Chaucer Review 53.1 (2018): 3-35.

I have supervised PhD students working on such topics as depictions of textiles and weaving in Old Norse poetry and prose, and the posthumous reputation of Alfred the Great, and am currently supervising (or co-supervising) projects on Chaucer’s pedagogy, gender in the Middle English bird debate, medievalisms in the work of M.R. James and Richard Barham, and narrativizing the life of Sweyn Forkbeard. I would welcome applications from students intending to work in similar areas, or on any topic related to my wider research activity.

I currently teach on the following modules:

• EN1010: Reading English
• EN1090: Literature for Children and Young People
• EN2360: Critical Perspectives 2
• EN3027: The Latin World
• HA3489: Watching the Detectives
• EN3035: Weird Fiction/Weird Film
• EN3060: Science Fiction
• EN3010: Undergraduate Dissertation
• EN7223: Editing and Textual Cultures
• EN7227/EN7228: MA English Studies Dissertation
• EN7242: Old Haunts: The Ghost Story in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

I am always happy to engage with broadcasters, or with any publication for the general reader interested in my work, whether they belong to traditional print or new digital media; I have, for instance, given interviews with All About History, De Standaard, and BBC Radio Leicester about various research projects in the past, and have produced blog-posts, videos and podcasts on these issues. I am equally experienced as a public speaker, having delivered multiple lectures for a non-specialist audience, at the London Medieval Society, Nottingham Shakespeare Society, and at the Literary Leicester festival. I have also delivered similar invited talks at Northwestern University (Shaanxi), UCLA, Shaanxi Normal University, Université de Neuchâtel, the University of Birmingham, and the University of Oxford. I welcome any invitations for future work in this vein.

• BA (Hons): University of Leeds, at the College of Ripon and York St John (1999)
• MA: University of Sheffield (2002)
• PhD: University of Sheffield (2008)
• Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (2018)