In Summer 2022, 3rd year PhD candidate in English, Kashaf Qureshi, traveled to England on a Nicholson Fellowship to study Middle English miracle tales. Kashaf writes:

“Thanks to support from the Nicholson Center, I traveled to the British Library and the Lambeth Palace Library to examine collections of Middle English miracle stories contained in 14th-and 15th-century manuscripts. Medieval miracle tales sit somewhere between religious exemplum and sensationalist literature, and my research centered around representations of lurid transgressions such as incest and murder. My time in the archives led me to question the notion that these short stories were straightforwardly didactic. With their arresting structures of fantasy and desire, I learned that these tales’ varying formal and narrative features cultivated complex reading experiences that both reinforced and tested the limits of a redemptive imaginary in the Middle Ages.”

– Kashaf Qureshi

Collection of Tales. British Library Add MS 25719, f. 62v-63r

“The Craft of Dying.” British Library Add MS 10596 f. 1v-2r.