Dr Hattie Soper
MSt (Oxon.), PhD (Cantab.), PGCert.
Current positions
Lecturer in Medieval Literature
Department of English
Contact
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Research interests
I am a scholar of bodies and time in medieval literature (and in the eyes that encounter it now). I specialise in Old English poetry, but my interests are wide-ranging and include also Old Norse and Middle English poetry and prose. Much of my work is situated between the medical and environmental humanities, investigating how human bodies are drawn into intimacy with their surroundings in their experience of time. I have a strong interest in representations of ageing and the life course, culminating in my first monograph; I am now currently working on a study of medieval play and playtime, as well as an exploration of echoes in material landscapes and in Old Norse poetic form.
Before coming to Bristol in early 2024, I was a Stipendiary Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge (2017–2019), and Simon and June Li Fellow in English Literature at Lincoln College, University of Oxford (2019–2023). I have also held visiting positions at the Huntington Library, the University of Seville, the University of California, Berkeley, and Yale University.
My work on ageing reveals how medieval texts encourage us to re-evaluate contemporary commonplaces, such as the idea of life being a cycle. A 'cycle' suggests a smooth, predictable (yet somehow recursive) passage from birth to old age, with every person experiencing every developmental stage in turn. My first monograph, The Life Course in Old English Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2024), explores how Old English poetry represents human lives as fluid, contingent and deeply variable, shaped by surprising turns of events: each person’s takes a different shape, and death can come at any time. Human lives also interweave with the lives of objects, animals, and communities. This 'scholarly yet accessible' study was awarded the University English Book Prize for 2024. Amy Faulkner remarks that the book 'will be of immense value to scholars in the field of age studies, regardless of literary period’ (The Review of English Studies). I also co-edited Early Medieval English Life Courses: Cultural-Historical Perspectives (Brill, 2022) with Thijs Porck (Leiden University). Like my monograph, this volume foregrounds entanglements between human and nonhuman lives, but from a more interdisciplinary perspective. As Timothy D. Arner summarised in Arthuriana, 'this valuable collection invites us to reflect on how our own understanding of the human life course influences our engagements with not only the pre-modern people we study but also the very modern people in our everyday lives’. I have also written several articles and book chapters on ageing, and discussed attitudes towards death on BBC Radio 3's 'Free Thinking'.
My project on playing takes an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, in dialogue with psychologies and sociologies of play as well as experimental archaeology. With Beth Kimber and Noreen Masud, I developed a 3D-printable replica of a noise-making toy popular from antiquity to the twentieth-century, the buzz-bone. I have also written on children at play in ‘Anthropic Time’ for Bloomsbury’s forthcoming Cultural History of Time in the Middle Ages (ed. Gillian Adler) and am co-editing a volume of essays on surfaces and tactility with Amy W. Clark (Wake Forest University).
On echo and Old Norse eddic poetry, I have published in Scandinavian Studies and Old Norse Poetry in Performance, ed. Brian McMahon and Annemari Ferreira (Routledge, 2022). I am currently working on a larger project exploring how sound and language rebounds in the spheres of literary form, intertextual relationships, and material environments, with attention to how Old English and Old Norse eddic poetry may find echoes in each other.
Within the world of Middle English, I have published in The Library on the subject of the manuscript contexts of the late fifteenth-century ‘Winchester Anthology’, and on age identities in Old and Middle English poetry for the Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Aging. My work also appears in The Review of English Studies, English Studies, Neophilologus, Notes and Queries, and elsewhere.
I supervise one PhD student, Laura Welsh, who is working on the language of eternity in Old and Middle English.
Publications
Recent publications
17/04/2024Age Identity in Old and Middle English Literature
The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Aging
Emotional Anthologies
English Studies
Sorrow Renewed
Notes and Queries
'The Wanderer' and the Legacy of Pathetic Fallacy
Neophilologus
The Life Course in Old English Poetry
The Life Course in Old English Poetry