Roger Dahood

Interests

Research

Old and Middle English Language and Literature, esp. sources and backgrounds of Chaucer's Prioress's Tale; critical text-editing

Teaching

Old and Middle English Language and Literature; British Literature; literary analysis at all levels of instruction

Courses

Scholarly Contributions

Books

• Dahood, R. (2014). The Avowing of King Arthur, rept of 1984 edition. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
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  The Avowing of King Arthur is an anonymous Middle English tail-rhyme romance of the late-fourteenth or fifteenth century. It survives in a single fifteenth-century manuscript, usually referred to as the Ireland Blackburne MS., after the Lancashire family that owned it in the nineteenth century. The edition corrects substantive scribal error, where the evidence provides firm ground for conjectural emendation, and for the first time provides a reliable text of the poem.
• Dahood, R., & Medine, P. E. (2013). Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History. New York: AMS Press.
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  Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History appears annually. The volume for 2013, which appeared in early 2014, is 3rd series, Vol. X. It includes seven essays by different authors on a range of medieval and early modern topics.

Chapters

• Dahood, R. (2018). “Destinctiun”, “chapitres”, “boc”, “dale”, and “stuche” in Ancrene Wisse. In Provisional title: The utility of the Tokyo Four-Text Parallel Edition of Ancrene Wisse. Berlin: Peter Lang.
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  Ancrene Wisse is an anonymous guide for anchoresses (female recluses) composed probably in the first third of the thirteenth century. The essay examines the copying history of the five words in the essay's title from the earliest manuscripts of Ancrene Wisse to the latest, over a span of perhaps a couple of hundred years (expert paleographers disagree, sometimes dramatically, about the manuscript dates). The words all appear in what scholars suppose to be authorial versions of the treatise, but copyists at different times replace some of the author's words, whereas they allow some of the original choices to persist. The essay draws out implications of these developments and is thirty-four double-spaced typescript pages in length.
• Dahood, R. (2017). Boy Crucifixion, Sainthood, and the Puzzling Case of Harold of Gloucester: Proceedings of the 2015 Harlaxton Medieval Symposium. In Saints and Cults in Medieval England(pp 140-55). Shaun Tyas, Doddington, Lincs, UK.
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  I presented the essay to the Harlaxton Medieval Symposium in July 2015, was invited to submit it for peer reviewed publication shortly afterwards, and in 2016 learned that it was provisionally accepted pending revision. I revised and the acceptance came in the fall of 2016. I mailed off the corrected page proofs in January 2017. The volume is scheduled to appear in July.
• Dahood, R. (2015). Alleged Jewish Cannibalism in the Thirteenth-Century Anglo-Norman 'Hugo de Lincolnia', with Notice of the Allegation in Twelfth-Century England. In Language Networks in Medieval Britain: Proceedings of the Harlaxton Medieval Symposium 2013.(pp 227-37). Donington, Lincs, UK: Shaun Tyas/Paul Watkins.

Journals/Publications

• Dahood, R. (2017). Avowing of Arthur, The. The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain, 1-2. doi:10.1002/9781118396957.wbemlb061
• Dahood, R. (2014). The Anglo-Norman “Hugo de Lincolnia”: A Critical Edition and Translation from the Unique Text in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France MS fr. 902. The Chaucer Review, 49(1), 1-38.
• Dahood, R. (1990). Review of Hoyt N. Duggan and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds. _The Wars of Alexander_, Early English Text Society, ss 10 (1989). Notes and Queries, 37(4), 458-459. doi:10.1093/nq/37-4-459
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  Book review

Presentations

• Dahood, R. (2019, February). "Discovering the Boy Crucifixion Genre". Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS)/Medieval Association of the Pacific (MAP) Joint Meeting. Scottsdale, AZ: ACMRS/MAP.
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  In November 2018 I submitted a proposal for consideration in a session of the joint conference, Feb 6-9, 2019. The program committee accepted the proposal and I undertook research and writing in November and December 2018 and January and February 2019. I presented the paper on Feb 9.The paper identifies a hitherto unrecognized genre of saints legend usually not distinguished from Blood Libel and ritual murder stories originating in England and later the European continent in the twelfth to the fifteenth century. The distinguishing feature is the alleged crucifixion by Jews at Passover or Easter of a preadolescent Christian boy in mockery of Christ's Passion.
• Dahood, R. (2016, March/April). Why the Legend of Harold of Gloucester Is a Boy Crucifixion Story. Medieval Association of the Pacific Annual Meeting. UC Davis, Davis, CA: Medieval Association of the Pacific, UC Davis.
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  The essay is an attempt to answer the question of why the legend of Harold, a Christian boy allegedly roasted alive by the Jews of Gloucester in 1168, is a Boy Crucifixion story, although it contains no crucifixion.
• Dahood, R. (2015, March). Is _The Avowing of Arthur_ a Diptych?. Medieval Association of the Pacific. Reno, NV: Medieval Association of the Pacific.
• Dahood, R. (2015, Summer). Sainthood, Boy Crucifixion, and the Puzzling Case of Harold of Gloucester. Harlaxton Medieval Symposium. Harlaxton Manor, near Grantham, Lincs, UK: Harlaxton Medieval Symposium.
  More info

  A version of the similarly titled article noted below and set to appear in 2017.

Others

• Dahood, R. (2017, May). The Avowing of Arthur. The Encyclopedia of British Medieval Literature.
  More info

  The 1000-word essay was invited in July 2013 and submitted in May 2014. The citation is misleading. It produces the submission date. The editors of the Encyclopedia have set a publication date of 2016. The Encyclopedia has not yet appeared as of February 2017.