I took my BA in Modern Languages from Christ Church, University of Oxford. After a year teaching French and German at secondary level, I received a Christ Church Studentship in Modern Languages to study for an MSt specialising in Medieval German literature. My dissertation, examining the German tradition of Marian laments, aimed to shed new light on the late fifteenth-century Bordesholmer Marienklage by reading it both as a product of a literary tradition as well as through historical, theological, paraliturgical and homiletic lenses. More broadly, I am interested in medieval conceptions of authorship and creation, text and music processes of translation and rewriting in Latin and German, monastic literary production and 'monastic' style, especially rhyming prose, and mysticism. 

My doctoral work, made possible by the Oxford-Dieter Schwarz Graduate Scholarship, embarks on a literary-critical study of Hildegard of Bingen's visionary trilogy and letters. Hildegard's work is made up of a shimmering interplay of divine, prophetic, virtuous and devilish voices beyond the visionary persona's own. Despite this, the nature and effects of these voices have been widely overlooked by the now extensive body of interdisciplinary scholarship on Hildegard's writing. My thesis will account for the roles that such a play of voices takes on in the creation of prophetic authority, in the context of the immediate manuscript transmission of Hildegard's works and their reception and rewriting in Gebeno of Eberbach's early thirteenth-century compilation of apocalyptic Hildegardiana, the Speculum Futurorum Temporum.