Lisa H. Cooper

I am a medievalist whose research sits at the intersection of literary studies and the history of craft, labor, and technology in the premodern world, particularly in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England. My first book, Artisans and Narrative Craft in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, 2011), explored the representation of artisans and their work across a wide range of genres, from vocabulary texts and comic poems to spiritual allegories and mirrors for princes. My second book in progress, The Poetics of Practicality, looks at how the explosion of “how to” texts in the later Middle Ages–an extensive syllabus of recipe collections, medical works, agricultural tracts, astronomical manuals, hunting treatises, alchemical works, and more–both influenced and was in turn influenced by literary form. The book argues that both well-known and less familiar medieval English writers in this period created a new kind of practice-oriented poetics in which the technically proficient might become the aesthetically pleasing, the necessary also the beautiful. I am deeply interested not just in the long history of science and technology, but also in the role that literature and other arts play within that history — and in the present.

I have been appointed a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, 2023-27; I am also the current Director of the Medieval Studies Program.)