Sebastian Sobecki
Sebastian Sobecki is Professor of Later Medieval English Literature, University of Toronto, St. George, with a cross-appointment in the Centre for Medieval Studies. He is a Fellow of the English Association and has also held fellowships with Harvard University, All Souls College (Oxford), Yale University, the Huntington Library, and Magdalen College (Oxford). He is a recipient of the John Hurt Fisher Prize from the John Gower Society and has received research funding from SSHRC, the British Academy, Québec's FQRSC, the German Research Foundation (DFG), and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). His board memberships include The Journal of the Early Book Society, the Index of Middle English Prose, Maritime Humanities 1400-1800 (Routledge), and Texts and Transitions: Studies in the History of Manuscripts and Printed Books (Brepols). He is a former trustee of the Hakluyt Society and, together with Michelle Karnes, edits the journal Studies in the Age of Chaucer.
His research and teaching extend to a wide area of late medieval and early modern literature, with a focus on ideas of the self, life writing, and materiality in the literary history of the long fifteenth century. He is particularly interested in Chaucer, Hoccleve, Kempe, Lydgate, Skelton, and Hakluyt. Authorship, law, travel, manuscripts, and palaeography are central to his practice. His work has been covered widely by international media, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, the BBC, the TLS, The New Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and many others. His more than seventy articles have appeared in Speculum (four articles), The Review of English Studies (three), The Chaucer Review (five), ELH, SAC, EHR, and Renaissance Studies, among others. He has produced two volumes for the Oxford edition of Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1598-1600), and he is completing the edited volume A Global History of Medieval Travel Writing: European Perspectives (Cambridge UP) and, with Daniel Donoghue and Nicholas Watson, Form and Power in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature: A Book for James Simpson (Boydell & Brewer). Ongoing editorial projects include The Cambridge History of London Literature: Vol. 1, The Beginnings to 1666 (Cambridge UP) and, with Emily Steiner, The Oxford Handbook of Middle English Prose (Oxford UP). In addition to writing The Marvels of John Mandeville (Reaktion) and completing the monograph The Invention of Colonialism: Richard Hakluyt and Medieval Travel Writing (Cambridge UP), he is working on two book-length studies, on Chaucer and authorial intention in fifteenth-century literature and on the handwriting and literary culture of London's bureaucratic clerks.
Education
- BA, Cambridge
- MPhil, Cambridge
- PhD, Cambridge
Research Interests
- Late Medieval and Early Modern Literature
- Authorship and Literary History
- Law and Politics
- Travel Writing and Global Medieval Literature
- Palaeography, Archives, and Manuscripts
Publications
Books and Volumes
- The Invention of Colonialism: Richard Hakluyt and Medieval Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), forthcoming
- (ed.) A Global History of Medieval Travel Writing: European Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)
- (ed.) Form and Power in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature: A Book for James Simpson, co-edited with Daniel Donoghue and Nicholas Watson (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, forthcoming)
- (ed.) Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming)
- (ed.) Richard Hakluyt's ‘Principal Navigations', vol. 2, co-edited with Angela Byrne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming)
- (ed.) 'The Case of Geoffrey Chaucer and Cecily Chaumpaigne: New Evidence', Chaucer Review (special issue) 57:4 (2022), co-edited with Euan Roger
- (ed.) An Edition of Miles Hogarde's Mirroure of Myserie (New York: Punctum Books, 2021)
- Last Words: The Public Self and the Social Author in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019)
- (ed.) Medieval English Travel: A Critical Anthology, co-edited with Anthony Bale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019; paperbacked in 2021)
- (ed.) A Companion to Medieval English Law and Literature, co-edited with Candace Barrington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019)
- (ed.) Studies in the Age of Chaucer, vols. 41-45 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019-2023), co-edited with Michelle Karnes
- (ed.) A Critical Companion to John Skelton, co-edited with John Scattergood (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2018)
- (ed.) ‘Our Sea of Islands: New Approaches to British Insularity in the Late Middle Ages', Postmedieval (special issue) 7:4 (2016), co-edited with Matthew Boyd Goldie
- Unwritten Verities: The Making of England's Vernacular Legal Culture, 1463-1549 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015)
- (ed.) The Sea and Englishness in the Middle Ages: Maritime Narratives, Identity, and Culture (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2011)
- The Sea and Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008)
Selected Essays and Chapters
- 'Response: Quo vadis, Adam Pinkhurst? Scripts, Scribes, and the Limits of Paleography’, Speculum (2024), forthcoming
- ‘Gens sans argent: A New Holograph Manuscript by Thomas Hoccleve', The Library 25:2 (2024), forthcoming
- ‘On raptus, Quitclaims, and Precedents in Staundon vs Chaucer-Chaumpaigne: An Afterword’, co-authored with Euan Roger, Chaucer Review 59:1 (2024), forthcoming
- ‘The Author's Three Bodies: Codicological Intentionalism and the Medieval Text', in ‘Interpreting Intention Now and Then', ed. James Simpson, special issue of The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 53:3 (2023), 573-96
- ‘Authorised Realities: The Gesta Romanorum, BL MS Harley 219, and Thomas Hoccleve's Poetics of Autobiography', Speculum 98:2 (2023), 538-58
- With Euan Roger, 'Geoffrey Chaucer, Cecily Chaumpaigne, and the Statute of Laborers: New Records and Old Evidence Reconsidered', The Chaucer Review 57:4 (2022): 407-33.
- ‘Communities of Practice: Thomas Hoccleve, London Clerks, and Literary Production', Journal of the Early Book Society 24 (2022), 51-106
- ‘The Handwriting of Fifteenth-Century Signet Clerks and the King's French Secretaries', in Scribal Cultures in Late Medieval England, ed. Margaret Connolly, Holly James-Maddocks, and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2022), 83-124
- ‘The Handwriting of Fifteenth-Century Privy Seal and Council Clerks', Review of English Studies 72:304 (2021), 253-79
- ‘Wards and Widows: Troilus and Criseyde and New Documents on Chaucer's Life', ELH 86:2 (2019), 413-440
- ‘Pilgrimage and Travel', A New Companion to Chaucer, edited by Peter Brown (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019), 331-344.
- ‘Hares, Rabbits, Pheasants: Piers Plowman and William Longewille, a Norfolk Rebel in 1381', Review of English Studies 69:289 (2018), 216-36
- ‘A Southwark Tale: Gower, the Poll Tax of 1381, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales', Speculum 92:3 (2017), 630-60
- ‘"The writyng of this tretys:" Margery Kempe's Son and the Authorship of Her Book', Studies in the Age of Chaucer 37 (2015), 257-83
- ‘New World Discovery', in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval and Tudor Literature, Oxford Handbooks Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)
- ‘Ecce patet tensus: the Trentham Manuscript, In Praise of Peace, and John Gower's Autograph Hand', Speculum 90:4 (2015), 925-59
- ‘Lydgate's Kneeling Retraction: The Testament as a Literary Palinode', Chaucer Review 49:3 (2015), 265-93
- ‘Bureaucratic Verse: William Lyndwood, the Privy Seal, and the Form of the Libelle of Englyshe Polycye', New Medieval Literatures 12 (2010) [2011], 249-86
- ‘Mandeville's Thought of the Limit: The Discourse of Similarity and Difference in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville', The Review of English Studies 53:211 (2002), 329-43