Sebastian Dows-Miller is a stipendiary lecturer in French at Merton and St Peter's Colleges, and a doctoral researcher in Medieval and Modern Languages at St Hilda's College. His research interests centre around the manuscript transmission of short texts, with a particular interest in those written in Old French. His doctoral thesis focusses on a fourteenth-century manuscript collection (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français, 24432), taking a mixed-method approach to questions of transmission, authorship, and textual context, which involves the use of data-driven and statistical approaches.
Publications and Other Research Outputs:
Articles Published:
‘A New Approach to Scribal Abbreviation in the Bestiaire in Merton College Library, MS 249’, Reinardus, 34 (2022), 60–76 https://doi.org/10.1075/rein.00059.dow
‘Hair of the dog’, Notes & Queries (2024) https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjae135 [Open Access]
Book Reviews in Popular Media:
‘Jody Enders, Trial by Farce: A Dozen Medieval French Comedies in English for the Modern Stage’, The Times Literary Supplement, 27 September 2024
‘Dolly Jørgensen, The Medieval Pig’, The Times Literary Supplement, 19 April 2024
‘K. Sarah-Jane Murray and Matthieu Boyd, The Medieval French Ovide Moralisé: An English Translation’, The Times Literary Supplement, 16 February 2024
‘Hana Videen, The Deorhord: An Old English Bestiary’, The Times Literary Supplement, 1 December 2023
‘Richard Rastall with Andrew Taylor, Minstrels and Minstrelsy in Late Medieval England’, The Times Literary Supplement, 18 August 2023
‘Clare A. Simmons, Medievalist Traditions in Nineteenth-Century British Culture: Celebrating the Calendar Year’, The Times Literary Supplement, 9 June 2023
‘Rosalind Brown-Grant and Mario Damen, A Chivalric Life: The Book of the Deeds of Messire Jacques de Lalaing’, The Times Literary Supplement, 11 November 2022
Book Reviews in Journals:
‘Leah Tether, Laura Chuhan Campbell, and Benjamin Pohl, The Bristol Merlin: Revealing the Secrets of a Medieval Fragment’, Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie, 139.2 (2023) https://doi.org/10.1515/zrp-2023-0022
‘Peter Haidu, The Philomena of Chrétien the Jew. The Semiotics of Evil’, Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie, 138.4 (2022) https://doi.org/10.1515/zrp-2022-0074
Conference Papers:
‘Scribal Abbreviation: Is it really more common at the ends of lines?’ (International Medieval Congress, Leeds, 2024)
‘Signs in (Manu)scripts : Towards A New Study of Scribal Abbreviation’ (Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference, Oxford, 2024)
‘Tangled Methods, Tangled Scribes : Mixing Quantitative and Qualitative Methods in Scribal Hand Analysis’ (International Medieval Congress, Leeds, 2023)
‘A New Palaeography? The Argument for a Macro-Level, Quantitative Approach to Scribal Hands’ (International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, 2023)
‘Jean from Saint-Quentin : Who Was He, and Does It Matter?’ (Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference, Oxford, 2023)
‘Personal Recovery, Spiritual Repair : The Aftermath of Post-Natal Infanticide in Two Old French Exempla’ (Gender and Medieval Studies Conference, London, 2023)
‘Codex as Corpus : Using TEI to Unlock a 14th-Century Collection of Old French Short Texts’ (TEI Conference, Newcastle, 2022)
‘”Will No One Rid Me of This Turbulent Priest?”: The Disposal of Ecclesiastical Corpses in the Old French Fabliaux’ (International Medieval Congress, Leeds, 2022)
‘“Blessed Are the Cheesemakers” : Urban Climates and Codicological Contexts in the Dits de Métiers’ (International Medieval Congress, Leeds, 2021)
Workshop Contributions:
September, 2024: participation in, and presentation at, a workshop on the use of data from legacy encoding projects, organised by the Values of French and Online Froissart teams at University College, London.
May, 2024: co-organisation of, presentation at, and participation in a workshop entitled Teaching the Codex : Hybridity at Merton College, Oxford.
April, 2023: participation in, and presentation at, a workshop on Abbreviation organised at Merton College, Oxford by Professor Jonathan Prag and Dr Robert Crellin of the CROSSREADS project. A chapter based on my contribution to this workshop is currently forthcoming in an edited volume, to be published in late-2024 in Open Access Gold.
December, 2022: participation in, and presentation at, a workshop entitled Translating the Middle Ages organised at Linacre College, Oxford by Dr Mary Boyle of Linacre College.
May 2022: participation in, and presentation at, a workshop entitled Bestiaries of AI organised at the Big Data Institute, Oxford by Dr Rachel Douglas-Jones of IT University of Copenhagen.