Sarah Lancaster

Thesis title:

What then do I love, when I love my God?: Divine personae and the human subject in the devotional culture of late fourteenth-century Yorkshire.

This thesis explores relationships between devotional writing and human subjectivity. It will be the first investigation of late medieval subjectivity with a regional emphasis, utilising a sharp focus on one literary milieu to provide a multi-dimensional exploration of cognitive, affective, somatic and situated forms of subjective experience. Core textual foci include The Northern Homily Cycle, the Northern version of God’s Own Complaint extant in the ‘Heege’ manuscript, the Desert of Religion and the Towneley Plays.

Research Area

English Language and Literature
Languages and Literature

Conferences

'Audience Positioning in God-Complaints: Educating the Rural and the Urban'. Paper presented at the 2023 Literacy in the Medieval Period conference at the University of Nottingham.

'Regional Modalities: Rural and Urban Identities at the End of the Fifteenth-Century'. Paper presented at the 2023 Identities, Communities and 'Imagined Communities' postgraduate conference at the University of Bristol.

'Deictic Shift in "Ich herde men upo molde"'. Paper presented online for the University of Nottingham's 2021 Distance Learning Colloquium.

Public Engagement & Impact

March 2023- Guest speaker at the John Wheelwright Archaeological Society, hosting a talk and Q&A on anchoritic spaces in medieval literature.

March 2022- 'Regional Spaces: Speaking through Landscape in Yorkshire Literature'. Organiser and host of an open access online event including interviews and readings with three contemporary Yorkshire writers.

Other Research Interests

Subjectivity
Regionalism
Vernacular theology
Affective piety
Iconography
Material Cultures
Book History
Medieval drama
Manuscript miscellanies

Memberships

Early English Texts Society member since 2023.