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Dr Lindy Brady

Senior Lecturer in Medieval History

History, Geography & Social Sciences

Headshot of Lindy Brady

Department: History, Geography & Social Sciences

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Profile

Biography

I received my BA and MA from Brown University and my PhD from the University of Connecticut. Before joining Edge Hill, I taught in the Department of English at the University of Mississippi and the School of History at University College Dublin. I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. My work focuses on transcultural and multilingual connectivity in early medieval Britain and Ireland. My first book, Writing the Welsh borderlands in Anglo-Saxon England (Manchester University Press, 2017) was winner of the Best Book on an Anglo-Saxon Topic Publication Prize from the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England in 2019 and the Southeastern Medieval Association award for best first book in 2020. My second book, The Origin Legends of Early Medieval Britain and Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 2022) was published last year, and I have just completed a Cambridge Element entitled Multilingualism in Early Medieval Britain.

I have held fellowships as a Text Technologies Fellow at Stanford University, A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Medieval Studies at the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame, British Academy Visiting Fellow at the University of Birmingham, Marie Skłodowska Curie COFUND Fellow in the Trinity Long Room Hub at Trinity College Dublin, and Resident Fellow in the Centre for Advanced Studies at the University of Tübingen. Current projects include a volume on multilingualism for the Cambridge Elements series and a larger project on intellectual connectivity in the Viking Age.

Research Interests

My work focuses on historical and textual connections across the early medieval Irish Sea zone, encompassing material in Old English, Old Irish, Middle Welsh, Old Norse, and Latin. Significant publications include:

Monographs

Multilingualism in Early Medieval Britain, Cambridge Elements (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

The Origin Legends of Early Medieval Britain and Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 2022)
Writing the Welsh borderlands in Anglo-Saxon England (Manchester University Press, 2017; repr. paperback 2019)

Edited collections

Origin Legends in Early Medieval Western Europe, ed. Lindy Brady and Patrick Wadden (Brill, 2022)
Old English Tradition: Essays in Honor of J. R. Hall (ACMRS, 2021)
Early English Poetic Culture and Meter: The Influence of G. R. Russom, ed. M. J. Toswell and Lindy Brady (Medieval Institute Publications, 2016)

Journal Articles

‘Heroic Biography and the Viking Age around the Irish Sea’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy: Archaeology, Culture, History, Literature 122C (2022): 123-41
‘The Fluidity of Borderlands’, Offa’s Dyke Journal 4 (2022): 3-15
‘Rogue Bishops Around the Irish Sea Before the Mid-Twelfth Century’, Peritia 31 (2020): 9-27
‘Inglewood Forest in Three Romances from the Northern Gawain Group’, Leeds Medieval Studies 1 (2021): 1-15
‘Crowland Abbey as Anglo-Saxon Sanctuary in the Pseudo-Ingulf Chronicle’, Traditio 73 (2018): 1-24
‘Late Medieval Irish Kingship and the Irish Arthurian Romance Eachtra an Mhadra Mhaoil (‘The Story of the Crop-Eared Dog’)’, Arthurian Literature 34 (2018): 69-87
‘An Analogue to Wulf and Eadwacer in the Life of St. Bertellin of Stafford’, The Review of English Studies 67 (2016): 1-20
‘Colonial Desire or Political Disengagement?: The Contested Landscape of Guthlac A’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 115 (2016): 61-78
‘An Irish Sovereignty Motif in Laxdæla saga’, Scandinavian Studies 88 (2016): 60-76
‘The ‘Dark Welsh’ as Slaves and Slave Traders in Exeter Book Riddles 52 and 72’, English Studies 95 (2014): 235-55
‘Death and the Landscape of The Fortunes of Men’, Neophilologus 98 (2014): 325-36
‘Feminine Desire and Conditional Misogyny in Arthur and Gorlagon’, Arthuriana 24.3 (2014): 23-44
‘Apples on Willow Trees: a Metaphor for Grafting and Spiritual Succession in the Early Irish Saints’ Lives of Berach and Coemgen’, Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 31 (2012): 56-73
‘Booklet Ten of Peniarth 359: An Early Modern English Astrological Manual Encoded through Welsh Phonology’, Studia Celtica 45 (2011): 159-83
‘Echoes of Britons on a Fenland Frontier in the Old English Andreas’, The Review of English Studies 61 (2010): 669-89

Book Chapters

‘The Corpus Glossary and Mercian intellectual culture in Anglo-Saxon England’, in Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age, ed. Benjamin Albritton, Georgia Henley, and Elaine Treharne, Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities (Routledge, 2020), 142-53
‘Three Swords of Doomed Inheritance in Beowulf’, in Old English Tradition ed. Lindy Brady (ACMRS, 2021): 173-85
‘Boars and the Geats in Beowulf’, in Early English Poetic Culture and Meter, ed. M. J. Toswell and Lindy Brady (Medieval Institute Publications, 2016): 61-72

Forthcoming

‘Migration, Identities, and Origin Myths’, in the new Cambridge History of Britain, Volume I, c. 410-c. 1100, ed. Fiona Edmonds and Rory Naismith
‘Origin Myths in Early Insular Pseudohistories: Medieval or Modern Propaganda?’, in Celtic Propaganda, ed. Ben Guy and Patrick Wadden
‘Æthelflæd and Wales: women and political power in early medieval Britain’, in volume on Æthelflæd, ed. Andrew Sargent, Morn Capper, and Charles Insley