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. Her first book, Imagining an English Reading Public, 1150-1400, will be published by Cambridge University Press in spring 2010. Beginning by examining medieval theories of habitus in a general sense, the book goes on to investigate the relationships between habitus, language, and Christian virtue. While most medieval pedagogical theorists regarded the habitus of Latin grammar as the gateway to a generalized habitus of virtue, reformers increasingly experimented with vernacular languages that could fulfill the same function. These new vernacular habits, she argues, laid the conceptual foundations for an English reading public. Katharine Breen’s current project examines allegory as an innovative and often experimental conceptual tool that allowed the expanding audiences of the later Middle Ages to grasp, manipulate and evaluate new ideas. When philosophical concepts are embodied in allegory, both the concepts themselves and the audiences they engage are altered by this metamorphosis.
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