Elizabeth M. Tyler

Profile

Biography

Elizabeth Tyler is Professor of Medieval Literature in the Department of English and Related Literature and the Centre for Medieval Studies. Her research and teaching focus on the literature of England situated within wider Insular, Latin West and Afro-Eurasian frameworks. Spanning the early and high Middle Ages, she is especially interested in poetry, history-writing, multilingualism and vernacular literary cultures. Her work, which develops comparative and connected methodologies, sits at the intersection of literary study and intellectual, political and social history.

Research

Overview

A central aim of my work is to create new models for the study of medieval European literature which attend to scales both smaller and larger than those of nationalizing literary history. I am interested in the connections (and disconnections) between the theorization and use of written local languages in this space and the importance of Latin as a language which creates literary, intellectual, political and confessional communities across these linguistic boundaries. These themes have shaped my work on history-writing and poetry and my attention to the role of both men and women in literary culture and are indebted to my time as one of the co-directors of the Centre for Medieval Literature (University of Southern Denmark and University of York, funded by the Danish National Research Foundation from 2012-2022).

My monograph England in Europe: English Royal Women and Literary Patronage, 1000-1150 argued for the integral place of England within Latin European literary culture on both sides of the Conquest, with a particular focus on Flanders, Northern France, the western Empire and Denmark. This work was funded by an Anniversary Lectureship at York and AHRC research leave. A piece on the eleventh-century British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius B.i reads this compilation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Old English translation of Orosius and Old English poetry as a theoretically sophisticated universal history, while a recent article looked at how the complex literary multilingualism of the eleventh-century English court shaped history-writing. ‘The Languages of History-Writing in the Ninth Century: An Entangled Approach’, with Prof. Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, examined the connections between the writing of Irish, Welsh, English and Old High German. Looking within England, I have interrogated the particularly West Saxon imperial, rather than English national, character of writing in English in the early tenth century, through a study of the Old English translation of Orosius. I am increasingly interested in exploring the writing of local languages within comparative frameworks which extend throughout the Christian world.

More recently, I have returned to the study of Old English poetry, which was the subject of my first monograph, Old English Poetry: The Aesthetics of the Familiar, but now within wider geographical and chronological frameworks. With Prof Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, Prof Wim Verbaal and indebted to Prof. Thomas O’Donnell, I have been working on a project on poetic anthologizing in the Latin West. Within this project my work on ‘Order’ has led me to begin a new monograph on the close relationship between two famous English poetic anthologies, the tenth-century vernacular Exeter Book and the eleventh-century Latin Cambridge University Library, Gg. 5.35. 

Alongside monographs, articles and chapters, I have edited eight essay-collections including: Narrative and History in the Early Medieval West, with Ross Balzaretti; Conceptualizing Multilingualism in England, c.800-c.1250; Medieval Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500-1500, with Jennifer Jahner and Emily Steiner; and Migrants in Medieval England, c.500-1500, with W. Mark Ormrod and Joanna Story.

I was the founding editor (with Prof. Julian Richards and Prof. Ross Balzaretti) of the Brepols series Studies in the Early Middle Ages and have served on the editorial board of Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies. I continue to edit Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures (Diamond Open Access), which was co-founded by Lars Boje Mortensen, Paolo Borsa, Chrisitan Høgel and myself and to serve on the editorial board of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (Old English series).

Supervision

I have supervised and co-supervised PhDs on a range of topics, including: Lay Male Sanctity in Twelfth-Century England; Motherhood in Late Anglo-Saxon England; Designations for the Christian God in Old English Poetry; Anglo-Saxon Ethnicity in Northumbria; Friendship in Late Anglo-Saxon England; Shadow in Old English and Old Norse Poetry; Ethics of Warfare in Anglo-Saxon Literature; Old French at St Albans; Historicity in Old Norse Literature; Ideas of Reform in Orderic Vitalis’ Ecclesiastical History; Representation of Books in Southern Anglo-Saxon England; Interdisciplinary Historical Semantic Study of the Old English Word Burh; Wulfstan’s Latin Homilies; Shaping the Atlantic in the Early Middle Ages (Jordanes, Bede and Beowulf); Cistercian Lives of nuns and lay brothers in the thirteenth-century Low Countries; and Thinking Through Nature: Distributed Cognition in the Anglo-Scandinavian World.

I would welcome enquiries about PhD supervision on the literature of England, especially within multilingual and wider European horizons, from the 8th-11th century.

External activities

Overview

I have enjoyed appearing on BBC Radio 4’s ‘In Our Time’ (on Cnut) and ‘Your Dead to Me’ (on Emma of Normandy), contributing to two French led television documentaries: ‘Knut the Viking Emperor’ and ‘Vikings: la Saga des Bluetooth’ and being on the advisory board for the upcoming William the Conqueror exhibition at the British Library.

Teaching

Undergraduate

At undergraduate level my teaching includes The World of Beowulf, a second-year language and literature module. In this module, beginning Old English is taught while we read Beowulf in its manuscript context, explore the Old English elegies of the Exeter Book and consider Alfred the Great’s vision for Old English. I also teach a third-year module, Kingdoms of the North: Literary Cultures from the Fall of Rome to the Norman Conquest, which looks at the multilingual space between the Humber-Mersey and the Antonine Wall as one where Latin, Welsh, Irish, English and Norse interacted.

Postgraduate

At Masters level, I teach Worlding Old English which considers the place of Old English literature within a multilingual Britain that was engaged with the full range of the known world. I also convene and teach on the Centre for Medieval Studies’ Global Middle Ages module which takes critical and interdisciplinary approaches to this topic.