George Younge

Profile

Biography

George Younge studied English at King’s College London, and subsequently completed a PhD in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Trinity College Cambridge in 2012. In the same year, he took up a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Centre for Medieval Literature (CML), an international research group based jointly at the Universities of York and Southern Denmark (Odense). In 2015, he was appointed as Lecturer in Medieval Literature at York.

George’s research focuses on British literary culture in the Early and High Middle Ages (c.600–1300). He is the author of articles on Anglo-Saxon religious poetry and prose, the Old English sources of the Gothic windows at Canterbury Cathedral, and anti-Jewish texts of the twelfth century. He is currently completing a monograph entitled Old English in the Age of Anselm and Becket,which examines the use of Old English literature in southeastern England after the Norman Conquest.

Research

Overview

I trained as an Anglo-Saxonist at the University of Cambridge, since when my research interests have expanded to include French and Latin literary culture in the centuries after the Norman Conquest. As a graduate, I wrote my thesis on the re-use of Anglo-Saxon vernacular prose in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. Although my work is grounded in the study of individual manuscripts and their immediate contexts, I am fascinated by the development of medieval literature over the longue durée, and its place within a wider European framework. I am particularly interested in contact between languages and moments of transition, especially the emergence of Old English at the end of the migration period, its decline in the twelfth century, and the subsequent rise of Middle English and French. My research explores the institutional, political, and cultural forces that informed these transformations. Many of my publications cross disciplinary boundaries, setting literary texts alongside historical and visual sources, including manuscript illumination and stained glass. A core principle of my research is the conviction that English literary culture only comes into focus when situated alongside other European traditions. As such, I am interested in the comparative study of Old and Middle English alongside other European vernaculars, ranging from Old Norse to Slavonic.

Projects

I am currently completing a monograph entitled English Literature in the Age of Anselm and Becket. This book examines the use of Old English in the century after the Norman Conquest, focusing principally on sermons and devotional poetry from southeastern England. Along with Giles Gaspar and Margaret Healey-Varley, I am co-editing a volume of essays entitled Anselm of Canterbury: Communities, Contemporaries and Criticism, in which I have an article on Old English books produced at Canterbury during archiepiscopate of Saint Anselm. I am also co-authoring an essay on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle with Elizabeth Tyler for a forthcoming volume, Migrants in Medieval England, 500–1500, edited by Mark Ormrod, Jo Storey, and Elizabeth Tyler. Other projects at various stages of development include a study of the Anglo-Saxon sources of the exquisite early Gothic windows at Canterbury Cathedral (funded by a Paul Mellon Publication Grant), an edition and translation of Honorius Augustodunensis' Elucidarius, an essay on R. W. Chambers and the Great War drawing on his unpublished letters in the National Archives at Kew, and a note on the location of Margaret Paston's private chapel.

Teaching

Undergraduate

I am the course convener for the second-year FLM module 'Anglo-Saxon Literature' and the second-year period module 'Late Medieval Literature'. I am Admissions Tutor at the Centre for Medieval Studies and contribute teaching to the core course of the MA. I would welcome applications from PhD students looking to study any aspect of Anglo-Saxon or High Medieval literary culture.