Medieval Studies Talk by Dr. Jennifer Lorden on November 11

Dr. Jennifer Lorden, associate professor at William & Mary, will give a talk on Fiction and Belief in Early England on November 11th. The event will begin at 5:30pm in ZSR room 404, and will be free and open to the public. See the lecture description and speaker biography below, and join us at the talk on the 11th!

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Bathhouses, Battle Scars and Unicorns: Fiction and Belief in Early England

What does it mean to write “truth” or “fiction”? Medievalists have increasingly sought to date the rise of fiction to well before the advent of the modern novel, yet modern theorists of fiction who favor a later dating nevertheless make a good point: modern standards of literal, documentary truth differ from medieval ones. Nevertheless, medieval writers did care about distinguishing between truth and fiction: through texts ranging from Classical myths in philosophy books, to high seas adventures, to the lives of unlikely saints, they developed new vernacular terminology for self-conscious fictions, inviting modern readers to both question how we define fiction and scrutinize the modern understanding of “truth” and “fact” as prerequisites to fiction.  

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Biography from Speaker’s Website:

“I study the earliest English literature. Most of my work considers how literary form tells cultural and intellectual histories. My current research ranges from the multilingual literary cultures of early medieval England and beyond, to medieval ideas about affect and emotion, to fictionality and poetic narratives of history.

My first book, Forms of Devotion in Early English Poetry: The Poetics of Feeling (Cambridge University Press, 2023), offers a formal history of the complex conventions that reveal–but have also obscured–the importance of affective piety in early English devotional poetry. I’m also the author of Literary Form in Early Medieval England (Cambridge University Press, 2025), part of the Cambridge Elements series England in the Early Medieval World. I’m at work on a new monograph project, The Claims of Fiction in Early Medieval England, on the truth claims of the post-classical and proto-Romance fictions of pre-Conquest England. My work on the literary and intellectual cultures of the early medieval period has appeared in PMLA, Medium Ævum, Modern Philology, New Medieval Literatures, JEGP, and elsewhere.

I received my PhD from UC Berkeley, where I was supported by a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, after receiving my master’s from the University of Oxford. I currently teach medieval literature as an Associate Professor of English at William & Mary. I also serve as the chair of the Old English Forum Executive Committee at MLA, and as an editor for The Medieval Review.”