I took my BA in Modern Languages from Christ Church, University of Oxford. After a year teaching French and German in a secondary school, I received a Christ Church Studentship in Modern Languages to study for an MSt 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, creation and prophetic speech; processes of translation and rewriting in Latin and German; monastic literary production and style; mysticism; and medieval drama in its manuscript context.

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. These can often be difficult, if not impossible, to delineate from one another. Despite this, the nature, effects and the seemingly deliberate intermingling of these voices have been largely overlooked by the now extensive body of interdisciplinary scholarship on Hildegard's writing. My thesis, therefore, aims to move away from readings of Hildegard's work which attempt ultimately to find in it the 'voices' of historical people (as discussions of the so-called Mitarbeiterproblem have rehearsed at length), proposing instead to examine the construction and intermixture of voices in her letters and visionary works. This will include an examination of the ways in which these textual voices were identified and delineated in immediate manuscript transmission and in Gebeno of Eberbach's thirteenth-century compilation of apocalyptic Hildegardiana, the Speculum Futurorum Temporum. My findings will have ramifications for our understanding of how Hildegard received and rewrote biblical material (including the Psalms and the Song of Songs); how her works create an unassailable prophetic authority; and of her 'theology of voice', as imagined in the voice of the devil and, I argue, her covert representation of the voices of the persons of the Trinity.