Megan Cook

Education

• Ph.D., English, University of Pennsylvania
• M.A., English, New York University
• B.A., Political Science, University of Michigan

Areas of Expertise

• Middle English language and literature
• Chaucer
• History of the book
• Editorial history and textual theory
• Early modern poetry and prose

Personal Information

I teach medieval literature, with an emphasis on Chaucer and other late medieval poets, and I research and write about the fate of Middle English texts and books in the early modern period. In my monograph The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532-1635 (Penn, 2019), I examine the scholarly reception of Chaucer’s works in sixteenth-century England, with special emphasis on the role of antiquarians in the production of early printed editions. Drawing on both intellectual history and studies in the material book, I seek to understand how antiquarian readers used Middle English poetry to produce new knowledge about literary history and how this, in turn, informed emerging views of the English past. Work related to this project has also appeared in Spenser Studies, Chaucer Review, Manuscript Studies, and Studies in Philology, as well as in an edited collection on Chaucer and Spenser from Manchester University Press.

I care deeply about the ways that language, poetry, and politics combine in the stories we tell ourselves about shared pasts and collective presents. I am currently working on a book project exploring how late medieval and early modern English people understood vernacular language change, and the political and poetic purposes to which they put that understanding.

As I’ve pursued this research, I’ve developed a related interest in textual editing. With Elizaveta Strakhov, I am the co-editor of John Lydgate’s Dance of Death and Related Works (Medieval Institute Publications, 2019), and with R.D. Perry, I edited Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women for a new critical edition of Chaucer’s collected works from Cambridge University Press. With Perry and with Taylor Cowdery, I am at work on a new edition of the minor poems of the fifteenth-century poet John Lydgate, supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant.

I am also at work on a history of Chaucer's reception and transmission from 1400-2000, to appear with Routledge Press. In addition, I write about what I call dirtbag medievalism, imaginative allusions to or recreations of the Middle Ages in popular culture that prioritize the emotional impact of familiar tropes and imagery over historical fact.

I’ve also written and lectured on the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries, heralds and heraldry, the history of the miscellany, pre-photographic representations of medieval books and artifacts, and pedagogy of the History of the Book. I serve as a trustee of the New Chaucer Society, a member of the council of the Bibliographical Society of America and am a senior member of the Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School. 

In the English department, I teach courses in first-year writing, all aspects of medieval literature, and the history of the book.