Reader in Middle English literature

Tel: +44 (0)24 7652 3271
Email: Sarah.Wood@warwick.ac.uk

Faculty of Arts Building, Room 5.57

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About

Sarah Wood was educated at a comprehensive school in Wiltshire and at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She has taught medieval and early modern literature at Warwick since 2014. She previously taught at University College London and at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She has also held two short-term research fellowships at the Huntington Library, San Marino CA.

Research interests

Research interests include Piers Plowman, religious literature, Middle English alliterative poetry, and the history of the book. My first book, Conscience and the Composition of Piers Plowman Link opens in a new window(Oxford: OUP, 2012), was an exploration of literary ‘character’ in the multiple discourses and versions of which Langland’s poem is composed. I have since co-edited a new edition of the widely circulated instructional poem The Prick of ConscienceLink opens in a new window for the Early English Text Society (Oxford: OUP, 2013) and published a number of articles on the text and manuscripts of Piers Plowman. My most recent book, Piers Plowman and its Manuscript TraditionLink opens in a new window, was published by Boydell and Brewer/York Medieval Press in the series York Manuscript and Early Print Studies. My current work focuses on war and literature, particularly in the Middle English alliterative poem The Siege of Jerusalem.

I welcome enquiries from students seeking supervision in Middle English literature, particularly Piers Plowman, religious literature, and alliterative poetry.

Selected publications

See here for a complete listLink opens in a new window.

Piers Plowman and its Manuscript Tradition (York: York Medieval Press/Boydell and Brewer, 2022).

Conscience and the Composition of Piers Plowman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Richard Morris’s ‘Prick of Conscience’: A Corrected and Amplified Reading Text, ed. by Ralph Hanna and Sarah Wood, Early English Text Society, o.s. 342 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

‘Two Notes on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: l. 34 “lel letteres” and l. 193 “dok”’. Notes and Queries 13 February 2025 https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjaf019

'Monologic Langland: Contentiousness and the 'Z Version' of Piers Plowman', Review of English Studies 68 (284) (2017), 224-243. Selected as the Editor's Choice for best medieval essay in 2017.

‘Langlandian Loose Leaves and Lost Histories’, The Library, 7th series, 17 (December 2016), 371-98. Selected as the Editors' Choice for December 2016.

'Non-authorial Piers: C-text Interpolations in the Second Vision of Piers Plowman in Huntington Library, MS HM 114’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 114.4 (October 2015), 482-503.

‘A Prose Redaction of The Prick of Conscience Book VI in Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 23’, Medium Ævum, 80 (2011), 1–17.

Qualifications

• BA (Hons), M.St., D.Phil (University of Oxford)