Helen Appleton

I am currently a Departmental Lecturer in Old English in the Faculty of English. I have worked in Oxford for about a decade in various College and University roles. Prior to moving to Oxford, I was at the University of Sydney, where I completed my PhD. Working on the Early Medieval period means dealing with literature that is both incredibly alien and strangely familiar, and I relish the challenge of trying to understand texts produced more than a millennium ago and the culture that created and transmitted them. 

For Trinity I contribute to the teaching of Prelims Paper 2 (c. 650-1550) and FHS 2 (1350-1550). For the Faculty, I teach Old English Literature and the Material Text to undergraduates and graduate students.

My research focuses on how the world is imagined and represented in the literature of Early Medieval England, from the eighth to the twelfth century. I examine a diverse range of texts in both verse and prose, in Old English and Anglo-Latin, alongside visual culture. I work on hagiographies, especially those of St Cuthbert and St Guthlac, poems such as Andreas and Beowulf, and popular preaching materials. I am interested in how the health of the environment is connected to people’s behaviour, particularly their faith (or lack thereof), and the way in which imagined places echo familiar landscapes, revealing perceptions of England’s place in the world. 

‘Our Spiritual Meeting Places: Regulating Liturgical Processions in Old English Homilies’, in Sermons, Saints, and Sources: Studies in the Homiletic and Hagiographic Literature of Early Medieval England, ed. Tom Hall and Winfried Rudolf (Brepols, 2024) 

‘Mapping Empire: Two World Maps in Early Medieval England’ in Ideas of the World in Early Medieval English Literatures, ed. by Kazutomo Karasawa, Mark Atherton and Francis Leneghan (Brepols, 2022), pp. 309–334. Winner ‘Best Book’ 2023, International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England 

‘Folk Horror: Hell and the Land in Old English Homilies for Rogationtide’ in Essays and Studies 2021: The Literature of Hell, ed. by Margaret Kean (D. S. Brewer, 2021), pp. 13–36 

‘Water, Wisdom, and Worldliness in the Anglo-Saxon Prose Lives of Guthlac’, in Meanings of Water in Early Medieval England, ed. by Carolyn Twomey and Daniel Anlezark (Brepols, 2021), pp. 211–40 

‘The Northern World of the Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi’, Anglo-Saxon England, 47 (2020 (for 2018), 275–305