I've been thinking for a while about posting my talk from Kalamazoo 2019, and I've finally gotten around to doing that. I was invited to present about my work on apocrypha for a session titled "Old English Homilies I: New Discoveries, New Insight," sponsored by the Dictionary of Old English (DOE) and Electronic Corpus of … Continue reading Preaching Apocrypha in Early England: Historiographic Currents
[This post is part 2 in a series of reflections about my book, Preaching Apocrypha in Anglo-Saxon England (order here); read part 1 here and part 3 here.] After I finished my PhD, settled into my first job, and started revising my dissertation into a book, I pulled out all of the comments I had received from … Continue reading Preaching Apocrypha: Revisions
[This post is part 1 in a series of reflections about my book, Preaching Apocrypha in Anglo-Saxon England (order here); read part 2 here and part 3 here.] My book Preaching Apocrypha in Anglo-Saxon England will be out from the University of Toronto Press in July (pre-order at that link for 25% off!), so lately I've been thinking about the project as … Continue reading Preaching Apocrypha: Beginnings
This semester I'm teaching a History of the English Language course, and it's offering no end to delights in my life. I taught a HEL course only once before, as a two-semester grad seminar, with about 10 students. My course this semester is a 400-level undergraduate class with 22 students. So this time around is … Continue reading Antichrist in HEL
CFP: Preach It, Sister! A Roundtable about Women and Homiletics Sponsored by the Society for the Study of Anglo-Saxon Homiletics at the 53rd International Congress on Medieval Studies Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, MI), May 10-13, 2018 For over ten years at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, the Society for the Study of Anglo-Saxon Homiletics … Continue reading CFP: Preach It, Sister! A Roundtable about Women and Homiletics
When I first started working on texts related to the biblical Judith in Anglo-Saxon England (which I discuss here), I had several goals: one of these was to provide more exposure to literature other than the Old English poem Judith. The sermon On Judith by Ælfric of Eynsham was one of the main texts that sparked my interest. Ælfric … Continue reading Ælfric’s Sermon On Judith
My article “Ælfric’s Genesis and Bede’s Commentarius in Genesim” has been accepted for publication in Medium Ævum, forthcoming within the next year. In this article, I suggest that one contributing factor to Ælfric’s decision to stop translating Genesis halfway through (at chapter 22) is his knowledge of and use of Bede’s Commentarius in Genesim, which also concludes after the … Continue reading Ælfric’s Genesis and Bede’s Commentarius in Genesim
This weekend, the End is finally upon us. At least, that's what some outspoken would-be prophets are saying about one upcoming astronomical event on September 27, 2015: the first occurrence in over thirty years of a total lunar eclipse of a supermoon. (The last eclipse like this occurred in 1982, the next is set to occur in 2033.) One … Continue reading Supermoon Eclipse, Apocalypse, & Medieval History
My article "Psalm 151 in Anglo-Saxon England" has been accepted for publication in the Review of English Studies. This essay presents the first sustained examination of the apocryphal psalm in early England, focusing on manuscript witnesses and the two extant Old English gloss translations. Below are the abstract and introduction to the article. The Psalms were a central aspect of … Continue reading Psalm 151 in Anglo-Saxon England (forthcoming in RES)
CFP: Society for the Study of Anglo-Saxon Homiletics at the 51st International Congress on Medieval Studies Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, MI) May 12-15, 2016 Preaching Texts in Early England: Homiletics and Beyond For over ten years at the ICMS, the Society for the Study of Anglo-Saxon Homiletics has thrived in its aims to promote scholarship … Continue reading CFP for Preaching Texts in Early England: Homiletics and Beyond
Brandon W. Hawk 