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Edward Mills

Department: French
Discipline: Modern Languages
Research Centre/Unit: Centre for Medieval Studies

Project Summary

My thesis is aims to respond to one overarching question: how was education imagined and enacted in (and through) the French texts of medieval England? In answering this question, I'm investigating three types of texts: computus manuals, designed to illustrate the methods for calculating movable feasts such as Easter; the proverbial and paremiological tradition evident in Anglo-Norman translations of the Latin Disticha Catonis; and a corpus of five 'courtesy texts', which sought to instruct their young audiences on appropriate social behaviour. I am also investigating the lexical semantics of the verbs used to refer to education in this period, and am currently building a corpus of instances of these verbs in order to map the semantic domain of instruction during this period. In this field, I'm drawing on Frankwalt Möhren's notion of the noyau sémantique as well as the work carried out by Charles J. Fillmore in frame semantics.

Supervisory Team

I am supervised by Thomas Hinton and Susana Afonso, both members of the the Modern Languages Department (French and Portuguese / Linguistics) in the College of Humanities.

Wider Research Interests

I retain an interest in medievalism and the reception of the Middle Ages, and enjoy working on access and outreach projects that make use of medieval material. My Master's dissertation explored the reception and functions of the game of chess in medieval French texts, ranging from its appearance as a plot device in narrative texts to its position at the heart of so-called 'problem manuscripts'.

In the wake of my recent tentative forays into the subject, I'm also developing an interest in cognitive and lexical semantics, and particularly how the insights offered by these methodologies can be applied to pre-modern texts.

Authored Publications/Reports

Edward Mills (1st July 2018) The French of Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Review Article), French Studies, 72.3, 426

Edward Mills (1st July 2017) Le Français médiéval par les textes: anthologie commentée (Review Article), French Studies, 71.3, 402

Edward Mills (1st April 2019) An Anglo-Norman Reader (Review Article), French Studies, 73, 279

Edward Mills (1st June 2019) Later Additions to the Anglo-Norman Texts of British Library, Add. MS 59839, Notes and Queries, 66, 192-95