Who We Are

Organisers

Teaching the Codex is run by Tristan Franklinos and Mary Boyle. Tristan came to palaeography through Classics, and Mary through medieval English. They began to compare approaches during their Master’s degrees at Merton College, Oxford, and discussions with fellow postgraduates made clear the variety of teaching methodologies out there. These discussions led, ultimately, to Teaching the Codex. The Teaching the Codex committee members are Alex Peplow, Jessica Rahardjo, and Sebastian Dows-Miller. 

About Mary:

Mary is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Medieval and Modern Languages and Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College, Oxford, looking at nineteenth-century cross-cultural Anglo-German medievalism. Before moving to Oxford, she was an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Maynooth University. In 2017, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for British Studies/ Großbritannien-Zentrum at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and a lecturer in German at Oriel College, Oxford. She completed an AHRC-funded doctorate at Merton College, Oxford in 2016, researching late medieval accounts of pilgrimage from England and Germany to Jerusalem. She is interested in the comparative literary study of Germany and England throughout the Middle Ages, and particularly in religious writing. Mary has also worked on English vernacular manuscripts and German and English early printed books. Her current research interests are in  nineteenth-century cross-cultural (Anglo-German) medievalism.

You can read her blog here, or follow her on Twitter. Click here for her faculty page.

Publications:

• (2023) International Medievalisms (DS Brewer) (ed.).
• (2022) Violent Victorian Medievalism (Treasures of the Taylorian Series Three: Cultural Memory 4). Free ebook version available for download.
• (2021) Writing the Jerusalem Pilgrimage in the Late Middle Ages (DS Brewer).

• (forthcoming 2024) ‘Medievalist Forgery? Editions, Adaptations, and Translations of Kudrun in the Nineteenth Century’ (postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies).
• (2023) ‘Emma Letherbrow’s Gudrun: Kudrun for ‘modern’ Victorians’ in International Medievalisms, ed. Mary Boyle (D.S. Brewer).
• (2021) ‘Hardly gear for woman to meddle with’: Kriemhild’s Violence in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Versions of the Nibelungenlied‘ (Translation and Literature).
• (2020) ‘Imaginatio, Anachronismus und Heilsgeschichte’ (with Annette Volfing) in Geschichte Erzählen, ed. Sarah Bowden, Manfred Eikelmann, Stephen Mossman, and Michael Stolz (Narr).
• (2019) ‘To Gaze or Not to Gaze: The Nineteenth-century Der arme Heinrich from Volksbuch to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Miracle Rhyme”’ (Modern Language Review)
• (2018) review of Rüsenberg (2016) Liebe und Leid, Kampf und Grimm: Gefühlswelten in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters (Modern Language Review).
• (2017) ‘Merton College, MS. 315: An Introduction’ (Oxford German Studies).
• (2015) ‘Converting Corpses: The Religious Other in the Munich Oswald and St Erkenwald’ (Oxford German Studies).
• (2015) ‘William Wey’s Itinerary to the Holy Land: Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 565 (c. 1470)’ (Bodleian Library Record). Conclusions included in the Bodleian Library’s online catalogue entry for MS. Bodl. 565.

• (2022) Recording of ‘Writing the Jerusalem Pilgrimage’, a talk given at the University of Portland’s Garaventa Center.
• (2022) ‘Bad mothers: women in children’s literature’ (The Tablet, 1 January 2022) (free with registration). This piece appeared in the print edition under the title ‘The land of make-believe’.
• (2021) Blood, Stones and Holy Bones (History Today).
• (2021) In the proxy footsteps of the past (The Tablet).
• (2021) Writing the Jerusalem Pilgrimage in the Late Middle Ages (Medieval Herald)

• (2016) Verse translations of thirteen poems for sleeve notes of Der Wanderer: Schubert Lieder (Delphian Records).
• (2013) Two translations in The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought: Volume 3. Aesthetics and Literature, ed. Christoph Jamme and Ian Cooper (Cambridge: CUP).

About Tristan:

Tristan is a Lector in Greek & Latin in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Oxford, a Supernumerary Fellow at Wolfson College, and teaches for Oriel College, Oxford. He also holds an Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung fellowship at the Abteilung für Griechische und Lateinische Philologie (Mittellateinische Philologie) at LMU-Munich until 2024. From 2018 to 2021, he held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship and was a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Oxford.

Current projects include a new critical edition of, and literary commentary on, [Vergil]’s Catalepton and Priapea, an edition and translation of Peter Abelard’s Hymns, and an annotated translation of Sicco Polenton’s quattrocento history of Latin literature. In his first monograph, he explores the ways in which the Latin elegist Propertius engages with and recasts his own poetic material, as well as that of his peers and predecessors. More broadly, he is interested in the literature of the first century B.C. (esp. the poets and Vitruvius); medieval Latin literature; the place of the author and the reader in relation to a text; and in textual criticism, palaeography, and the history of the book. You can follow him on Twitter here. Click here for his faculty page.

Publications:

• (under contract) T. E. Franklinos and R. Modonutti, Sicco Polenton: Lives of the Great Latin Authors (Bloomsbury Academic, London).
• (2020) T. E. Franklinos and L. Fulkerson (edd.), Constructing Authors and Readers in the Appendices Vergiliana, Tibulliana, and Ouidiana (Oxford University Press, Oxford).
• (2020) T. E. Franklinos and H. Hope (edd.), Revisiting the Codex Buranus: Contents, Contexts, Composition (Boydell & Brewer, Woodbridge).

• (2022), ‘Ovid’s Fasti in Exile’, Classical Quarterly 72.
• (2022), ‘Henry James’ “The Middle Years” (1893) and Its Vergilian Undercurrents’, Henry James Review 43: 164–77.
• (2021), ‘Elegiacs on Octavius (and) Musa: exploring Catalepton 4 and 11’, in B. Kayachev (ed.), Poems without Poets: Approaches to Anonymous Ancient Poetry (Cambridge; CCJ supp. 43), 67–84.
• (2020), ‘Construing the author as a Catullan reader in the pure iambic Catalepton (6, 10, 12)’, in Franklinos & Fulkerson (edd.) supra, 70–82.
• (2020), ‘Classical Learning and Audience in the carmina amatoria: a Case-Study on Codex Buranus 92’, in Franklinos & Hope (edd.) supra, 119–48.
• (2020), ‘The music of the spheres: Giovanni da Serravalle on Dante, Par. 124–126’, Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 55: 291–300.
• (2020), ‘The Cause of Idmon’s Death at Seneca, Medea 652–3, and at Valerius Flaccus 5.2–3’, Classical Quarterly 70: 268–75.
• (2019), ‘Notes on the text of Catalepton 10’, Classical Quarterly 69: 912–15.
• (2018), ‘summa harena: the sand’s surface and Ovid, metamorphoses 2.573’, Hermes 146: 512–16.
• (2018), ‘Ovid, ex Ponto 4: an intratextually cohesive book’, in S. Harrison, S. Frangoulidis & T. Papanghelis (edd.), Intratextuality and Latin Literature (Berlin/Boston), 289–306.
• (2017), ‘A Plautine Emendation: “miles gloriosus” 1268’, Hermes 145: 109–12.
• (2015) ‘Textual Notes on Palladius’ opus agriculturae’, Mnemosyne 60: 1020–30.

Committee Members

Alex Peplow:

Alex is a DPhil student in the History Faculty, University of Oxford. He is working on a thesis entitled ‘Political Ecclesiology: Ockham, Ludwig IV, and Anti-Papal Imperialism’. He is also interested in the spread of non-German literature within the Empire. You can follow him on Twitter here. 

Jessica Rahardjo:

Jessica is a DPhil student in the History Faculty, University of Oxford. Her thesis is on a corpus of Islamic gravestones in early modern maritime Southeast Asia. She is also interested in Arabic and Southeast Asian manuscript cultures. She is currently a fellow of the Indian Ocean Exchanges art history programme. Jessica has been a member of the Teaching the Codex committee since 2016, when she was completing her MPhil in Islamic Art and Archaeology at Oxford. Click here for her academia.edu page, or follow her on Twitter here.

Sebastian Dows-Miller:

Sebastian is a DPhil student at St Hilda’s College and within the Medieval and Modern Languages faculty. His research is focussed on short Old French literary texts from the 13th and 14th centuries, particularly in the context of manuscript transmission and culture. He is also interested in promoting and developing the use of digital humanities tools in medieval scholarship, particularly through the TEI XML initiative. You can follow him on Twitter here.