Medieval and Contemporary Poetry in Dialogue

Join us this Wednesday at Mansfield College for our panel discussing how poets have conceptualised time over the ages. We are incredibly fortunate to be joined by Dr Laura Varnam, Professor Jane Griffiths, Dr Mark Atherton and Shaw Worth, and hopefully you too! The theme threading through our Society's events and publications this year is time, with our Ash 2024/25 anthology adopting the subtitle 'Hourglass'. We are interested in the relationship between poetry of the past and contemporary verse/readers of today, and what we can learn from that relationship. Taking this transtemporal approach, we hope, will shed light on what has been lost—and gained—in poetry over time, and perhaps allow us to explore conceptualisations of time at different stages in our literary history. Although we'll have some set questions for our panellists, we are really looking to open up a discursive space and chart some new connections together. Jane Griffiths has published six collections of poetry with Bloodaxe Books, of which Another Country (2008) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection and Silent in Finisterre (2017) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She is Fellow and Tutor in English at Wadham College, Oxford, and has also published extensively on the poetry of the medieval period; she has previously worked as a bookbinder and lexicographer, and now practises as a painter and jeweller as well as a writer. Laura Varnam is the Lecturer in Old and Middle English Literature at University College, Oxford. She was one of the three winners of the Nine Arches Press Primers competition in 2023 and her poetry sequence ‘Grendel’s Mother Bites Back’ was published in Primers Volume Seven in 2024. She is working on a full collection of poetry inspired by the women of Beowulf and a second poetry project on the medieval mystic Margery Kempe. Mark Atherton grew up in Blackburn, Lancashire; he is Senior College Lecturer in English language and Literature at Regent's Park College, Oxford, and Lecturer in English Language at Mansfield College, Oxford. He is the translator of Hildegard of Bingen: Selected Writings (1999) and author of There and Back Again: J. R. R. Tolkien and the Origins of The Hobbit (2012); he has also published on philology and the study of language in the nineteenth century and on early medieval English history and literature. He has published a historical monograph The Making of England (2017) and a textbook Complete Old English, 3rd edition (2019). Most recent is his The Battle of Maldon: War and Peace in Tenth-Century England (2021), which he followed up with a further article on the use of rhyme in the poem The Battle of Maldon and a field study based on travels in East Anglia and Essex: a ‘landscape biography’ of Ealdorman Byrhtnoth, the hero of the poem. Shaw Worth is reading for an MSt in Medieval Studies at Magdalen College; his research considers developments in verse form and single-subject portraiture between England and France in the fifteenth century. He was a Foyle Young Poet of the Year in 2016, 2017, and 2019; he was runner-up and shortlisted in the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition 2022, longlisted in the National Poetry Competition 2023, and won the 2024 Newdigate Prize for verse at Oxford. His work has appeared variously online, on the stage, and in print.