Professorial Fellow in English, Library Fellow, St Hilda's College
Jeremy Griffiths Professor of Medieval English Palaeography, Faculty of English

Professor Daniel Wakelin is the Jeremy Griffiths Professor of Medieval English Palaeography. He came to Oxford from Cambridge, where he was a student at Trinity Hall, a Junior Research Fellow at St Catharine’s College and then a Fellow and University Lecturer in English at Christ’s College. He has also held visiting positions at some universities and libraries in the USA.

In the Faculty of English, Professor Wakelin primarily teaches manuscript studies for the MSt course in English Language and Literature 650-1550. His research focuses on the material remains of English literature between the fourteenth and early sixteenth centuries: manuscripts, and some printed books, and what they reveal about writing habits and reading habits. Within this field, his special interests are scribal practices and the history of craft; marginalia and other ‘genres’ of writing by, for or about readers; humanist reading and scholarship; manuscripts of carols; fifteenth- and sixteenth-century courtly poetry and interludes. Professor Wakelin's current research includes planning Designing English, an exhibition about page design in the Middle Ages, to be displayed at the Bodleian LIbrary in late 2017 and early 2018, and editing a collection of essays on photography and the study of manuscripts.

Among his recent publications are:

Designing English: Early Literature on the Page (Bodleian Library, 2017)

Revolting Remedies from the Middle Ages (Bodleian Library, 2017)

‘Thys ys my boke: Imagining the Owner in the Book’, in Mary Flannery and Carrie Griffin, ed., Spaces for Reading (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 13-33

‘Early Humanism in England c.1440-1490’, in Rita Copeland, ed., The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature: Volume I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 487-513

‘When Scribes Won’t Write: Gaps in Middle English Books’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 36 (2014), 249-78

Scribal Correction and Literary Craft: English Manuscripts 1375-1510 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). This book was joint winner of the DeLong History Book Prize 2015 for ‘Scribal Correction and Literary Craft: English Manuscripts 1375-1510’ Cambridge University Press, 2014.

‘England: Humanism beyond Weiss’, in David Rundle (ed.), Humanism in Fifteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: SSMLL, 2012), 265-306

‘Caxton’s Exemplar for The Chronicles of England?’, Journal of the Early Book Society, 14 (2011), 55-83

‘Writing the Words’, in Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin (ed.), The Production of Books in England 1350–1500 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 34-58

‘Instructing Readers in Late Medieval Poetic Manuscripts’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 73 (2010), 433-52

‘Maked na moore: Editing and Narrative’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 32 (2010): 365-73

‘Possibilities for Reading: Classical Translations in Parallel Texts ca. 1520–1558’, Studies in Philology, 105 (2008), 463-486

Humanism, Reading, & English Literature 1430–1530 (Oxford University Press, 2007)

‘William Worcester Writes a History of his Reading’, New Medieval Literatures, 7 (2005), 53-71