Project Team

Dr Ryan Perry is the Principal Investigator on Whittington’s Gift. He is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Literature and Co-Director of the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Kent. He has published widely on manuscript culture and most recently, specifically on the Middle English pastoral manuals that lie at the centre of this project. Ryan has worked with Dr Stephen Kelly on a number of related projects, and as part of the AHRC-funded Geographies of Orthodoxy project, they co-edited Devotional Culture in Late-Medieval England and Europe: Diverse Imaginations of Christ’s Life (2014) along with co-writing essays that align closely with the current project, ‘“Citizens of Saints”: Creating Christian Community in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 23’, in Middle English Religious Writing in Practice: Texts, Readers and Transformation, ed. Nicole Rice (2013) and “Devotional Cosmopolitanism in Fifteenth-Century England”, in After Arundel, eds. Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh (Brepols, 2011). Ryan is currently working on a monograph-length study, The Material Text: Studies in Middle English Manuscript Culture, 1380-1480.

Dr Stephen Kelly is the project’s Co-Investigator. He is Senior Lecturer in English and English Subject Lead in the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen’s University Belfast. He previously co-directed the AHRC-funded project Geographies of Orthodoxy (2007-2010). The project produced two major essay collections – The Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ: Exploring the Middle English Tradition (eds. Ian Johnson and Alan Westphall, 2013) and the above-mentioned Devotional Culture in Late-Medieval England and Europe (2014), which he co-edited with Dr Perry. His book Imagining History in Medieval Britain (Bloomsbury) is crawling tediously, painfully, toward completion.

Dr Natalie Calder is a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the project, based at Queen’s University Belfast. She received her PhD from QUB in 2017. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Natalie’s thesis – ‘Modalities of Belief in the “Long” Fifteenth Century: Rethinking English Religious Writing’ – proposed a re-evaluation of lay religious experiences in late medieval England through analysis of vernacular religious writings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. She has published her work in The Review of English Studies, as well as the edited collections Medical Paratexts from Medieval to Modern: Dissecting the Page (2018) and Reading Heresy: Religion and Dissent in Literature and Art (2017). She is currently a contributor to the Year’s Work in English Studies, covering medieval religious writings.

Dr Hannah Schühle-Lewis is a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the project, based at the University of Kent. She received her DPhil from St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford in 2019. Her DPhil thesis, ‘Oxford, Bodleian Library, Trinity College MS 93: A Study and Partial Edition’, examined the Middle English Declaracion on the Bible, a fascinating and innovative summary-commentary on the Wycliffite Bible dated c. 1390 and surviving in a single copy. She has written a chapter on the Declaracion for the edited collection Wycliffism and Hussitism: Methods, Impact, Responses, eds. Kantik Ghosh and Pavel Soukup (forthcoming). She is also working on an edition of the Middle English Declaracion on the Bible, to be published by EETS.

The project also has two consultants:

Professor James Carley is a Distinguished Research Professor at York University, and an Honorary Professor at the University of Kent.

Professor Ralph Hanna is Professor Emeritus at Keble College, Oxford and Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Riverside.