Dr Helen Spencer

Helen Spencer teaches literature of the medieval period (Old, as well as Middle, English), and also the history of the English language (a paper which invites students to consider aspects of language use at the present, as well as the development of the language over time; there is a particular emphasis on the ways in which writers have thought about language). The particular subject of her research is medieval religious prose and the history of the Church in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. She is the current Editorial Secretary of the Early English Text Society, which was founded in 1864 to publish editions of works written in English before 1550, to make these previously unpublished writings available to scholars, and, in particular to make them available to those engaged in preparing the Oxford English Dictionary.