Most of my work addresses emotion, ethics, and community in Middle English texts, especially imaginative poetry and instructional prose, with a particular interest in how those abstractions are shaped by the dictates of class and gender. My newest research takes a slightly different tack, investigating the premodern antecedents of carbon culture.
Published work is listed below. I’m always happy to share offprints, answer questions, or discuss work in progress. Just email me at spencer.strub [at] princeton.edu.
scorn, shame, and the simple reader
Scorn, Shame, and the Simple Reader: Lay Piety and Literature in Late Medieval England (forthcoming at the University of Pennsylvania Press) traces the emergence of a pugnacious public identity, open to anyone — the “simple reader” — out of an emotional style originally intended for religious women withdrawn from the world. In telling this story, it asks what it meant for a medieval reader to identify with a text, especially when they reach across lines of class and gender to do so, and how writers’ formal and representational choices might have encouraged or frustrated those identifications.
journal Articles
“The Anchorite as Analysand: Depression and the Uses of Analogy,” Exemplaria 35.1 (2023): 48-65
“Learning from Shame,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 32 (2018): 37-75
“The Idle Readers of Piers Plowman in Print,” New Medieval Literatures 17 (2017): 201-36. For a full transcription of the annotations in the Bancroft Piers, see here.
Chapters in edited volumes
“Medieval Satire and the Canon Law of Claustration in The Little Hours (2017),” in Law, Justice, and Society: Teaching the Middle Ages through Film, ed. Christina Bruno, Esther Liberman Cuenca, and Anthony Perron (New York: Fordham University Press, 2025), 195-207. (Get the book!)
“Proverb and Satirical Time: The Digby Poems and their Fifteenth Century,” in Form and Power in Medieval and Early Modern Literature: A Book for James Simpson, ed. Daniel Donoghue, Sebastian Sobecki, and Nicholas Watson (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2024), 201-22. (Get the book, or read the chapter on JSTOR.)
“Hoccleve, Swelling and Bursting,” in Thomas Hoccleve: New Approaches, ed. Jenni Nuttall and David Watt (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2022), 124-21. (Get the book, or read the chapter on Cambridge Core.)
Spencer Strub 