Roundup of Girton Medieval News, 2025-26

This academic year has been a momentous one for medievalists at Girton! In addition to the funding of Girton Medieval and its launch, our members have made some massive accomplishments in their fields. Below is a brief and inexhaustive overview of some of these:

‘Girton Fellows solve a 130-year-old Chaucerian literary mystery’

A direct result of interdisciplinary collaboration within Girton, James Wade and Seb Falk have received international media attention for their discovery which reanalysed a manuscript fragment from Peterhouse’s archive and pointed to three words which may have been misread for centuries. Published within the Review of English Studies, read more about it in the University’s feature, as the cover of the English Faculty’s annual magazine, or in the New York Times.

Girton announced a new Senior Research Associate scheme intended to bring outstanding scholars, eminent public figures, distinguished alumni, and professional leaders to the College. Some of the recently selected Associates include medieval scholars who are already contributing to the active intellectual life in college, such as English literature researcher Taeho Jo and bestselling author and illustrator, Amy Jeffs.

Anthony Bale was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy, the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences. He also became a Fellow of the English Association and was a Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellow at the Huntington Library. The year saw continued success for his bestselling Travel Guide to the Middle Ages (2023) which was published in further languages including Spanish, Japanese, and Russian. The Medieval Ideas Creative Lab, of which Anthony is PI, had an exciting year of creative arts and industries engaging with medieval sources, see their GIPHY channel.

For a Cambridge University video, Seb Falk spoke on the medieval and astronomical background in how Christian and Islamic scholars determine the dates of Easter and Eid: Faith and the Moon: Why astronomy dates Lent and Ramadan. These themes feature within his bestselling book The Light Ages: A Medieval Journey of Discovery (2020).

James Wade co-edited the book which accompanied Veronica Forrest-Thomson at Girton, a celebration and recentring of attention on a Girtonian poet. He also organised a panel at the Cheltenham Literature Festival along with Nick Hart and Girton Senior Research Associate Amy Jeffs.

Jake Stattel joined Girton as Rosamund Chambers Research Fellow in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic with a postdoctoral project on ‘Law in the Viking Diaspora’. He has since been elected to the Council of the UK’s academic society for Viking Studies (VSNR), and selected as a Visiting Researcher at the Centre for the World in the Viking Age at Uppsala University, Sweden. After a successful bid to the Girton New Initiatives Fund, he is now coordinating Girton Medieval as well as a linked initiative seeking to connect Medieval Studies across the University of Cambridge.