Caroline Batten

https://oxford.academia.edu/CarolineBatten

Supervisor: Dr Francis Leneghan and Prof Heather O'Donoghue

Research Interests: The Old English metrical charms; Old English metre and poetics; Old English and Old Norse magic, medicine, gender and sexuality studies, history of emotions.

Doctoral Research: My thesis is one of the first complete metrical, stylistic, and poetic analyses of the twelve Old English metrical charms, spells largely copied down in the tenth and eleventh centuries. I examine the ways in which the charms' poetic features clarify and emphasise their thematic content, discuss them in relation to their Old Norse, Old High German, and Latin analogues, and explore what the charms can tell us about Anglo-Saxon understandings of disease, sexuality, the body, and the human relationship to the supernatural.