Annie Sutherland
Rosemary Woolf Fellow & Tutor in Old and Middle English; Professor of Medieval Literature
At Somerville, I teach Old English to first-year students and Middle English to the second years.
I also supervise finalists who have chosen to write dissertations on Old English or later medieval topics and authors.
In the English Faculty, I teach a wide variety of medieval literature to undergraduates, though I particularly enjoy lecturing on religious texts and cultures of the Middle Ages, and on modern and postmodern responses to the medieval. I am also very interested in interdisciplinarity, and regularly take students to workshops in the Ashmolean, where we have the opportunity to handle and discuss the Museum’s extensive collection of devotional artefacts, thinking about them in relation to literary culture. I also play a role in the provision of teaching for second and third-year students who have chosen to specialise in the literature and language of the medieval period (we call this Course 2). At graduate level, I supervise a range of MSt and DPhil students, particularly those who work on religious and biblical literature, and on devotional texts written by and for women. Current and recent DPhil students have worked on the language of suffering in thirteenth-century pastoral texts for women, the practice of prayer, the manuscripts of devotional texts, the Wycliffite translation of the Bible, the intersection between visual, material and literary cultures of devotion, the role of ‘otherworlds’ in religious texts, and the idea of compassion.
In my own research, I am interested in English religious literature of the early Middle Ages, particularly that which was intended for the use of female audiences. At the moment I am working on a collection of thirteenth-century prayers which were apparently composed for (and possibly by) a group of women living on the borders between England and Wales. These women seem to have been highly intelligent individuals, very possibly from wealthy backgrounds. Yet they chose to spend their lives in seclusion, voluntarily locked into small cells in which they could focus their attention on God. I am fascinated by what motivated them to live such lives, and by the books that they read in their isolation. My edition of these prayers (known collectively as the ‘Wooing Group’) is to be published by Liverpool University Press. I have also been commissioned by Cambridge University Press to edit a wide ranging, interdisciplinary collection of essays on the body in the global Middle Ages, The Body in Medieval Literature and Culture, c. 1000-1500. Below is a list of my further publications.
Publications
‘Voicing the Creed in On Lofsong of ure Louerde’ in Herbert-McAvoy, Gunn, and Yoshikawa (eds.), Women and Devotional Literature in the Middle Ages – Giving Voice to Silence (Boydell and Brewer, 2022)
‘Enclosure and Exposure: Locating the House without Walls’ in Suerbaum and Gragnolati (eds.), Openness in Medieval Culture (ICI Berlin Press, 2022)
Suerbaum and Sutherland (eds.), Medieval Temporalities: The Experience of Time in Medieval Europe (Boydell and Brewer, 2021)
‘Out of Time: Temporality and Female Devotion in Thirteenth-Century England’ in Suerbaum and Sutherland (eds.), Medieval Temporalities: The Experience of Time in Medieval Europe (Boydell and Brewer, 2021)
‘A Talkynge of the Loue of God: The Art of Compilation and the Compiled Self’ in Cre, Denisson and Renevey (eds.), Late Medieval Devotional Compilations in England (Brepols, 2020)
‘þe Wohunge of ure Lauerde and the House without Walls’ in Ashe and Hanna (eds.), Medieval and Early Modern Religious Cultures: Essays Honouring Vincent Gillespie on his Sixty-Fifth Birthday (2019)
‘The Unlikely Landscapes of On God Ureisun of Ure Lefdi’ in Boffey and Whitehead (eds.), Middle English Lyrics: New Readings of Short Poems (Boydell and Brewer, 2018)
‘The Wycliffite Psalms’ in Solopova (ed.), The Wycliffite Bible: Origin, History and Interpretation (Brill, 2017)
English Psalms in the Middle Ages, 1300-1450 (OUP, 2015)
‘‘In eching for the best’: The Fourteenth-Century Prose Psalter and the Art of Psalm Translation’ in Leneghan and Atkin (eds.), The Psalms and Medieval English Literature (Boydell and Brewer, 2017)
‘The Wycliffite Psalms’ in Solopova (ed.), The Wycliffite Bible: Origin, History and Interpretation (Brill, 2016)
‘Psalms as Polemic: The Middle English Translation Debate’ in Suerbaum, Thompson and Southcombe (eds.), Polemic: Language as Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Discourse (Ashgate, 2015)
‘Julian of Norwich’ in Taylor (ed.), The Handbook of Women Biblical Interpreters (Baker Publishing Group, 2012)
‘Performing the Penitential Psalms in the Middle Ages’ in Suerbaum and Gragnolati (eds.) Aspects of the Performative in the Middle Ages (De Gruyter, 2010)
‘Comfortable Wordis’: The Role of the Bible in The Doctrine of the Heart’ in Renevey and Whitehead (eds.), A Companion to the Doctrine of the Heart (University of Exeter Press, 2010)
‘The Middle English Mystics and the Bible’ in Rowland, Joynes, Lemon, Mason and Roberts (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)
‘English Psalms in the Middle Ages’, Bodleian Library Record, 28 (2009)
‘All my rites of holy church: Julian of Norwich and the liturgy’ in Herbert McAvoy (ed.), A Companion to Julian of Norwich (Boydell and Brewer, 2008)
‘Biblical Text and Spiritual Experience in Richard Rolle’s English Epistles’, The Review of English Studies, New Series, 56, no. 227 (2005), 695-711
‘The Chastising of God’s Children – A neglected text’ in Barr and Hutchison (eds.), Text and Controversy from Wyclif to Bale – Essays in Honour of Anne Hudson (Brepols, 2005)
‘‘oure feyth is groundyd in goddes worde’ – Julian of Norwich and the Bible’ in Jones (ed.), The Medieval Mystical Tradition Exeter Symposium VII (Boydell and Brewer, 2004)
‘The dating and authorship of the Cloud corpus – a reassessment of the evidence’ Medium Aevum vol. lxxi, 2002, 82-10