Sarah Wood completed her MSt and DPhil. at the University of Oxford, where she also taught as a College Lecturer at Keble College (2006-08) and Harris Manchester College (2007-08). She came to UCL as a Lecturer in 2008.

Research

Sarah specialises in Middle English literature, especially Piers Plowman and other religious texts. She has a particular interest in allegory, the social and historical contexts of late medieval literature, editions, and the history of criticism.

Sarah’s current research centres on two major strands of interest within the Department, Editions and Life Stories. She is presently writing a book arising from her doctoral research on the treatment of personification allegory and the development of the versions of Piers Plowman, provisionally entitled ‘Following the Furrow: Conscience, personification, and the development of Piers Plowman’. Like the work of several other members of the Department, Sarah’s research on this topic engages with ideas about narrative and the representation of selfhood in literary texts. Sarah’s research also explores the evolution of Piers Plowman through three successive versions, examining how these versions have been presented in editions and commentary and seeking to open up new ways of thinking about the versions as an intelligible sequence. Sarah’s work on this topic complements other recent research within the Department on editions and on authorial revision of literary texts.

Sarah is also currently engaged in research on the sources and literary and manuscript context of the fourteenth-century religious poem The Prick of Conscience. A compilation from ‘learned’ Latin sources containing borrowings from earlier English and Anglo-Norman literature, the poem circulated widely throughout England and in terms of manuscript survivals was the most popular English poem of the late middle ages. Sarah’s interest in the origins and circulation of this poem coincides with a particular emphasis in the Department on the transmission of ideas and the dissemination of texts. [Editions]

Selected Publications

'"Ecce Rex": Piers Plowman B.19.1-212 and its contexts,’ The Yearbook of Langland Studies 21 (2007), 31-56.

'Mendicants and the Economies of Piers Plowman', section II, in The Friars in Medieval Britain: Proceedings of the 2007 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Nicholas Rogers, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 19 (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2010), pp. 224-38 'A Prose Redaction of The Prick of Conscience Book VI in Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc 23', Medium Ævum 79, 236-52 (forthcoming 2010) 'Playing with Patience: Word Games and the Text of Piers Plowman', in Play: Aspects and Approaches, ed. Sarah Baccianti and Tamara Atkin (forthcoming).