Katharine Breen

Assistant Professor of English

University Hall Room 322
Telephone: (847) 491-7486
Fax: (847) 467-1545
E-mail: khbreen@northwestern.edu

Katharine Breen (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley) teaches and writes in the areas of medieval English literature and medieval book history. Her interest in the Middle Ages begins in the fifth century with Sulpicius Severus's Life of Saint Martin , which sanctifies the shift from a Roman to a medieval cultural landscape, and extends from poetry and drama to monastic chronicles and penitential tracts. She focuses her attention most intensely, however, on English literature from the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries – especially William Langland's Piers Plowman and its tradition of poetic social criticism – and on the ways in which books seek to shape their readers through the interplay of material construction and textual content. She is currently working on a book about reading habits in medieval England that analyzes the transition from the Latin word habitus – which meant both “custom” and “monastic garment” and applied only to a clerical elite – to the English word habit , which attained its full semantic range in the last quarter of the fourteenth century. While scholars concerned with late medieval translation and vernacular literary production have concentrated on readers' access to texts, this book contends that the translation of reading habits was crucial to the development of a vernacular reading public. An article drawn from this project, “Returning Home from Jerusalem : Matthew Paris's First Map of Britain in its Manuscript Context,” appeared in Representations 89 (2005).

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