Neville Mogford

From September 2015 to September 2020, I was a research student based in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London, working under the supervision of Dr. Jennifer Neville, from 2015-20. I was a Visiting Marker at Royal Holloway in 2015/6, and I was a Visiting Tutor on the EN1001 module (Introduction to Medieval Literature) at Royal Holloway for 2016/7 and 2017/8. I ran the Royal Holloway Old English Reading Group in 2016/7 and the Royal Holloway medieval discussion group, aka LLAMA in 2017/8.

I was awarded a BA in English Literature from Brunel University in 2012, an MA in Medieval Studies from the University of Exeter in 2014, and a PGCE from the University of Reading in 2020. I won a Reid Scholarship for postgraduate research at Royal Holloway in 2015. I was awarded a PhD on 1st September 2020. From October 2020 until October 2021, I will be working as a Research Fellow in Medieval Latin at the University of Birmingham as part of the AHRC-funded Group Identity and the Early Medieval Riddle Tradition project.

I am an early medievalist, specialising in interdisciplinary approaches to Old English and Anglo-Latin literature. I also have an interest in the literature, history, and archaeology of Late Antique and Medieval Europe more generally, and the teaching of medieval studies in primary and secondary education.

Marking Time: Chronometry and Chronology in Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture (PhD project): 

From the 7th century all the way to the Norman Conquest, few areas of intellectual development were more pervasive or contentious in Anglo-Saxon religious life than the calculation, measurement, and division of time. Within the monastery, the two most prominent manifestations of timekeeping related to the calculation of Easter and the scheduling of the monastic day. The discipline of computus brought together arithmetic, astronomy, biblical exegesis, and classical lore in order to calculate repeatable dates for Easter. And the rigid complexities of the monastic day required an equally complicated and disciplined system of quotidian timekeeping. Since Anglo-Saxon literary culture was predominantly a monastic one, we might expect to find the influence of these forms of timekeeping in many different kinds of writing. And we can, in diverse ways across numerous genres. This thesis explores the relationship between timekeeping and literature in Anglo-Saxon England. How timekeeping and computation interacted with literary texts, particularly Latin and vernacular poetry, is the central question of this thesis.