My work on the Middle Ages centers on thinking about the alterity of the medieval past, and how this affects our understanding of the Middle Ages, as well as the ways that this alterity can help us rethink contemporary theories. I am particularly interested in socio-economic and anthropological issues in both contemporary theory and in the Middle Ages.
| My first book, published in 1999 at University of Michigan Press (Stylus series), examined the ways in which the rise of money, markets and the profit motive perturbed medieval ways of thinking about "exchange" broadly conceived, including economic, linguistic and semiotic exchanges. The literature of the tavern, inn and brothel - comico-realist literature - was a key space for proposing new discourses of exchange, as well as new models of literary creation and reception. |  |
| My second book, published in 2007 at D.S. Brewer (Gallica series), examines the medieval warrior aristocracy of Spain, France, Normandy, England, Germany, and southern Italy from an anthropological perspective. It focuses on both social history and epic literature, looking in particular at processes of identity formation through giving and violent taking, and the way these processes are anchored in notions of the sacred. It argues that the persona of the hero was a key trope for thinking about the nature and limits of these processes, for both the individual and the society as a whole. |  |
I recently colloborated on the production of a video/dvd version of The Song of Roland, which is distributed by Films for the Humanities. |
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