Dr. Elaine Treharne

Elaine Treharne is Professor of Early English Literature (MArAd Livepool, PhD Manchester) and specializes in Anglo-Saxon and later Medieval manuscripts and texts. She investigates the archeology of the book and the ways in which texts were received and used. She is a Co-Director of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Project, 'The Production and Use of English Manuscripts, 1060 to 1220', based in the Department of English at the University of Leicester (http://www.le.ac.uk/ee/em1060to1220/index.htm).

She is currently working on the theorization of the manuscript book, principally from the perspective of ‘Architextuality’, a concept which seeks to interpret the multiple layers of TEXT that contribute to the building of the book and the book as edifice. This has been the focus of a number of recent publications and conference papers and will form the basis for a major new project, tentatively entitled ‘The Sensual Book’.

Professor Treharne is also a textual editor, and has published a number of books that reflect this work including The Old English Life of St Nicholas, and Old and Middle English: An Anthology (shortly to be published in its third edition). She will publish The Ideology of English Texts, 1000-1200 with OUP in 2010, a book which concentrates on language and identity and the status of English in the early medieval period; and she is co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature (OUP 2010) with Greg Walker. With Professor Walker, she is General Editor of the new OUP series Oxford Textual Perspectives, and she is also General Editor of Essays and Studies.

Professor Treharne is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, a member of The Bibliographical Society, and the Convenor of the English Association Special Interest Group in the History of Books and Texts (http://www.le.ac.uk/engassoc/fellows/book.html). She is a former Chair of the Teachers of Old English in Britain and Ireland; and former Chair and President of the English Association. She is the Medieval Editor for Review of English Studies, an Editor for Speculum, and Early Medieval Editor for Wiley/Blackwell's Literature Compass.

In HoTT, Professor Treharne will focus principally on three strands of teaching:

1. ‘Codicology and Palaeography 500-1500’: how to read and evaluate written texts in their specific context. Students will learn how to access medieval handwriting in books, charters, writs, letters, and rolls in Latin and in English and French with a focus on materials produced in Britain, France and Italy.

2. ‘Architextuality: The Myth of the Text’: this course deals with manuscript cultures and writing environments from 1000-1800, centering on textual variance (mouvance) and the way in which scribal culture insists upon a revision of our modern conceptualisations of (literary) text through the complex mise-en-page and three dimensionality of the book.

3. ‘The Ideology of Writing’: this course examines the politics behind the production of writing, including an analysis of script from the classical period onwards, including all media from sculpture to reliquaries, manuscripts, rolls, to modern typeface in all its various forms. Issues of language, identity politics, and the dominant ideologies implicit in discussions of nationhood, regionalism, colonialism, postcolonialism will form major foci.

RECENT REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICATIONS
E. M. Treharne, ‘The Form and Function of the Vercelli Book’, in A. Minnis and J. Roberts, ed., Essays in Honour of Eamonn O’Carragain (Brepols, 2007).

E. M. Treharne, ‘Bishops and their Texts in the later Eleventh Century: Worcester and Exeter’, in Wendy Scase, ed., Essays in Manuscript Geography: Vernacular Manuscripts of the English West Midlands from the Conquest to the Sixteenth Century (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007).

E. M. Treharne, ‘Periodization and Categorization: The Silence of (the) English in the Twelfth Century’, in Rita Copeland, Wendy Scase and David Wallace, ed., New Medieval Literatures 8 (Brepols, 2007), pp. 248-75.

'Post-Conquest Readers of Old English', in A. N. Doane and K. Wolf, eds., Essays in Memory of Phillip Pulsiano (MRTS, Arizona, 2006), pp. 329-58.

‘The Life and Times of Old English Homilies for the First Sunday in Lent', in H. Magennis and J. Wilcox, ed., The Power of Words: Anglo-Saxon Studies Presented to Donald G. Scragg on His Seventieth Birthday (WVUP: Morgantown, 2006), pp. 207-42.

E. M. Treharne and D. F. Johnson, eds., Readings in Medieval Texts: Interpreting Old and Middle English Literature (Oxford University Press, 2005), 0-19-926163-6, 380pp.

E. M. Treharne, ed. and intro., Writing Gender and Genre in Medieval Literature: Approaches to Old and Middle English Texts, Essays and Studies (Boydell and Brewer, 2002), 145pp., ISBN 0 85991 760 6.

Mary Swan and E. M. Treharne, eds., Rewriting Old English in the Twelfth Century, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 30 (CUP, 2000), 220 pp., ISBN 0 521 623723.

'Producing a Library in Late Anglo-Saxon England: Exeter, 1050-72', Review of English Studies ns 54 (2003), pp. 155-72.

Timothy Graham, Raymond J. S. Grant, Peter J. Lucas, and Elaine M. Treharne, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge I, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimile 11 (MRTS, Arizona, 2004).

E. M. Treharne, ed., Old and Middle English: An Anthology, 2nd ed. (Blackwell, 2003), 678 pp., ISBN ISBN 140511312X (hb), 1405113138 (pb).

E. M. Treharne, ed., The Old English Life of St Nicholas with the Old English Life of St Giles, Leeds Texts and Monographs 15 (Leeds, 1997), 218 pp., ISBN 0 902296 25 6.