Dr Daniel Sawyer

Poetry

I'm writing a book that revises our understanding of the Middle English period through a series of case studies: poems that literary history says shouldn't exist. As a first move towards this book, I have published an article on a very strange poem: an accidental Shakespearean sonnet from 1448/9, embedded in a romance which imagines itself as a story coming from Persia and translated from Greek. I’m currently writing, among other things, on the coming of regular rhyme to English; on the two-and-a-half medieval inventions of English blank verse; and on the earliest known poem in English with a specific, naming attribution to a woman.

In tandem with this research, I've written a teaching book, How to Read Middle English Poetry. How to Read explains English and Scots verse-craft c. 1150–1500 for beginners. Although it serves student and general readers, it contains new research insights too. It's been called 'rigorous and instructive' and 'accessible and welcoming' in the TLS.

Manuscripts

I also find manuscripts interesting. I've written, for example, on the question of lost medieval manuscripts in a collaborative and interdisciplinary study based on several thousand manuscripts in Science in 2022, and in a piece discussing how canonicity works in the corpus of surviving manuscripts we have. I've also published on problems in editing in, for instance, medieval English romance.

My 2020 book, Reading English Verse in Manuscript c.1350–c.1500, offers the first book-length history of reading for later Middle English poetry. It emerged from the close consultation of hundreds of surviving manuscripts, and it deploys techniques ranging from close readings of rhyme and syntax to surveys of manuscript weight to establish a new ‘baseline’ picture of the reading practices once applied to English verse.

Other research

On the side, I publish on various topics such as manuscript fragments and the history of reading. I have a side interest in the medievalisms of queer California poets, which occasionally yields short articles, such as this piece on Thom Gunn, and a study of Jack Spicer currently forthcoming.

I’m involved in the effort to produce a new edition of the Wycliffite Bible, the first complete English translation of the Bible and the most sophisticated and most successful of the medieval European vernacular Bible translations. Oxford’s long-term project to re-edit the Wycliffite Bible can be found online. I have also edited Chaucer’s Cook’s Tale and Man of Law’s Tale for the Cambridge Chaucer project.