Aidan Conti

Researcher 2008-

Project title:
Anglo-Norman England and the Latin Learning of the Early Scandinavian Church

Project Summary:

My project focuses on the cultural exchanges between England and northern Europe in the later eleventh and twelfth centuries by centering on the transmission and reception of homiletic material in Scandinavia. This
examination of imported homiliaries and other liturgical books will elucidate
the manner in which Scandinavian homilists received, transmitted and
reinterpreted the basic teachings and writings of the Christian church. This
project will rely on available manuscript evidence and source studies to
present a detailed picture of the ongoing exchange and thereby enable a broader understanding of the role of preaching in liturgical contexts as well as in the popular imagination of the early Scandinavian world.

Publications:

• "The Gem-bearing Serpents of the Trinity Homilies: An Analogue for Gower's Confessio Amantis." Modern Philology. Forthcoming.

• "The Old Norse Afterlife of Ralph d'Escures's Homilia de Assumptione Mariae." Journal of English and Germanic Philology 107.2 (April 2008). 75-98.

• "The Circulation of the Old English Homily in the Twelfth Century: New Evidence from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 343." Precedence, Practice and Appropriation: The Old English Homily. Ed. Aaron Kleist. Studies in the Early Middle Ages 17. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007. 365-402.

• "Revising Wulfstan's Antichrist in the Twelfth Century: A Study in Medieval Textual Re-appropriation." Literature Compass 4.3 (May 2007): 638-663.

• with Haki Antonsson and Sally Crumplin. "A Norwegian in Durham: An Anatomy of a Miracle in Reginald of Durham’s Libellus de admirandis beati Cuthberti." West Over Sea: Studies in Scandinavian Sea-Borne Expansion and Settlement Before 1300. Edd. Beverley Ballin Smith, Simon Taylor and Gareth Williams. The Northern World 31. Leiden: Brill, 2007. 195-226. (Responsible for translation of "De clerico quodam Norwagensi", 216-24).

• "An Anonymous Homily for Palm Sunday, The Dream of the Rood, and the Progress of Ælfric’s Reform." Notes and Queries n.s. 48.4 (December 2001): 377-380.

CV:

Born 1971, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. Graduated magna cum laude, Duke
University, History and Latin, 1993. B.A. in English Language and Literature,
University of Oxford, 1998 (M.A., 2003). M.A. in Medieval Studies, University
of Toronto, 1999. PhD in Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, 2004. At the University of Toronto, I served as a research assistant for the Dictionary of Old English project and the Anglo-Saxon Formulary project. I have taught and/or been a teaching assistant for courses in Old English, Middle English and Medieval Latin.

Post-doctoral fellowship (2004-2007)

Publications registered in FRIDA