Dr Sarah Wood

Reader in Middle English literature

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

Faculty of Arts Building, Room 5.57

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About

I completed my undergraduate degree in English Language and Literature at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where I returned for my M.St. and D.Phil. in medieval literature. I taught in Oxford and at University College London before joining the English department at Warwick in 2014. In 2013 and 2014 I was a research fellow at the Huntington Library in California.

Research interests

I have published extensively on William Langland's Piers Plowman and its transmission. 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. My second monograph, Piers Plowman and its Manuscript TraditionLink opens in a new window (2022), the first book-length study of key manuscript witnesses of the poem, was published by Boydell and Brewer in the series York Manuscript and Early Print Studies. I have also written on the widely-circulated instructional poem The Prick of ConscienceLink opens in a new window, which I co-edited with Ralph Hanna for the Early English Text Society (Oxford: OUP, 2013). My current research projects include further work on Piers Plowman and on war in literature, particularly in the Middle English alliterative poem The Siege of Jerusalem.

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

Selected publications

(See here for a complete list)Link 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, 72 (2025), 111-15 https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjaf019

‘“Fire without flint”: Piers Plowman Z.6.71-72, 74’, Medium Aevum, 92 (2023), 374-85.

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

‘Two annotated Piers Plowman manuscripts from London and the early reception of B and C’, The Chaucer Review, 52.3 (2017), 274-97.

‘Langlandian Loose Leaves and Lost Histories’, The Library, 7th series, 17 (December 2016), 371-98. 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)