New MLAC publication: Professor Luke Sunderland has co-edited The Horizons of Medieval French and Occitan: New Approaches to Manuscripts and Texts, a new volume exploring how medieval French and Occitan manuscripts shape literary voice, cultural identity, and sensory experience.
A new volume edited by Professor Luke Sunderland (French) in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University has just been published.
Titled The Horizons of Medieval French and Occitan: New Approaches to Manuscripts and Texts, the book appears as Volume 28 in the Explorations in Medieval Culture series and is co-edited with Emma Campbell.
The volume celebrates the influential scholarship of medievalist Simon Gaunt and brings together leading scholars in the field to explore the evolving boundaries and future directions of medieval French and Occitan literary criticism. Through a range of innovative approaches, the essays examine how medieval texts and manuscripts shape cultural identity, literary voice, and sensory experience.
The contributions address key questions for the field today: What kinds of literary cultures emerge from supralocal vernacular languages? How do medieval manuscripts construct authorship, gendered identity, and voice across different genres? In what ways do manuscripts connect textual, visual, and aural forms of expression? And how do medieval French and Occitan texts conceptualise emotion, sacrifice, and the relationships between human and nonhuman bodies?
Bringing together perspectives from manuscript studies, literary criticism, and cultural history, the volume highlights the richness and diversity of medieval literary production while pointing towards new interdisciplinary directions for research.
Contributors include William Burgwinkle, Philippe Frieden, Jane Gilbert, Miranda Griffin, Alice Hazard, Thomas Hinton, Melek Karataş, Sarah Kay, Matthew Siôn Lampitt, Catherine Léglu, Peggy McCracken, Robert Mills, David Murray, Linda Paterson, Karen Pratt, Henry Ravenhall, and Simone Ventura.
The book was published in February–March 2026 and is available in both hardback and e-book formats.
More information about the volume can be found on the publisher’s website (click here).
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