Rebecca Stephenson

My PhD thesis and first book examined the interactions between Latin and English in Early Medieval England, culminating in my monograph The Politics of Language: Byrhtferth, Ælfric, and the Multilingual Identity of the Benedictine Reform. My more recent work has expanded to consider scientific writings produced in the Early Middle ages. I am particularly interested in the fields of medicine and the study of computus, which is the medieval method for calculating time and movable liturgical observances, like Easter. As part of these calculations, medieval writers began calculating the date of the end of the world and the coming apocalypse, and my current book project deals with apocalyptic ideas circulating in England in the late tenth and early eleventh century, a time of active Viking invasion.