The Beatrice White Prize

Prizes Awarded

2026

The Beatrice White Prize is awarded to Professor Rachel A. Burns, for her publication A History of Old English Verse Layout: Poetics on the Page (Arc Humanities Press, 2024). We’ll celebrate Rachel’s achievement at the 2026 EA Conference.

One of the judges commented:

Teachers of Old English literature routinely tell their students that vernacular verse was written out on the manuscript page ‘as if it were prose’ on account of the scarcity of valuable parchment. Rachel A. Burns groundbreaking monograph, A History of Old English Verse Layout: Poetics on the Page, forces us to rethink these long-held assumptions by demonstrating how scribes familiar with the copying of Latin poetry in verse lines experimented with different ways of presenting vernacular poetry to their readers. In a series of forensic case studies, Burns shows how early attempts at lineation were abandoned due to the irregular length of the Old English poetic line. The emergence of relatively standardised presentation of Old English verse on the manuscript page by the tenth century is found to be the result of a series of intelligent scribal choices rather than a purely pragmatic measure. Poetics on the Page will be essential reading for all students of Old English verse and early medieval manuscripts.

Rachel A. Burns is Associate Professor in Medieval English Literature at the Faculty of English, University of Oxford, and Tutorial Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, where she teaches English Literature c.650-1550. Her research centres on Old English verse, with particular attention to theology and book history. Her monograph, A History of Old English Verse Layout: Poetics on the Page (ARC Humanities Press, 2024), gives the first comprehensive history of the mise-en-page of Old English verse from its earliest manuscript witnesses to the present day.

2025

The Beatrice White Prize is awarded to Dr Amy Faulkner, for her publication Wealth and the Material World in the Old English Alfredian Corpus (Boydell and Brewer, 2023). We’ll celebrate Amy’s achievement at the 2025 EA Conference.

One of the judges commented:

Amy Faulkner’s outstanding new book, Wealth and the Material World in the Old English Alfredian Corpus, provides a fresh and invigorating analysis of the Old English translations of Gregory, Boethius, Augustine and the first fifty Psalms, all of which have been linked to the figure of King Alfred the Great. Faulkner makes judicious use of Thing Theory and New Materialism to gain new insight into these works, while paying careful attention throughout to linguistic and stylistic nuance as well as historical, literary and theological contexts. Through a series of illuminating close readings, Faulkner shows how the Alfredian corpus directs its readers to use the things of this world in pursuit of the joys of the next.

Amy Faulkner is Lecturer in Old and Middle English Language and Literature at UCL. She teaches across the whole medieval period with a research specialism in Old English literature, particularly the group of Old English prose translations traditionally associated with Alfred the Great: the Old English Pastoral Care, Boethius, Soliloquies and Prose Psalms. Her research interests include materiality, representations of the mind, and the place of Scripture in Old English literature. Her first monograph, Wealth and the Material World in the Old English Alfredian Corpus, was published by Boydell & Brewer in 2023.

2024

The Beatrice White Prize is awarded to Dr Kerstin Majewski, for her publication The Ruthwell Cross and its Texts: A New Reconstruction and an Edition of The Ruthwell Crucifixion Poem (De Gruyter, 2022). Kerstin’s achievement was formally celebrated at the 2024 AGM and Awards Ceremony.

One of the judges commented:

“Connections between the poem copied in the Vercelli Book and now known as The Dream of the Rood or The Vision of the Cross and the runic inscription on the Ruthwell Cross are the subject of Kerstin Majewski’s The Ruthwell Cross and its Texts: A New Reconstruction and an Edition of The Ruthwell Crucifixion Poem. In the most comprehensive study of the monument since Éamonn Ó Carragáin’s Ritual and Rood: Liturgical Images and the Old English Poems of the Dream of the Rood Tradition(UofTP 2005), Majewski offers a wholesale reassessment of the historical, literary and linguistic context of the cross and its inscription. While Ó Carragáin wrote of a ‘Dream of the Rood tradition’ attested in various iterations, including the Ruthwell and Brussels crosses and the Vercelli Book, Majewski follows David Howlett in referring to the text as it survives on the Ruthwell Cross as The Ruthwell Crucifixion Poem, as it features no dream element. Chapters One and Two situate the poem in its cultural and historical context, taking into account Latin hymns and other inscriptions. Chapter Three (pp. 64–108) addresses the inscription’s complex literary background, including a full discussion of its relationship to the Vercelli Book text, which is examined via Gérard Genette’s narrative theory. Here Majewski argues that a key difference between the The Ruthwell Crucifixion Poem and the Vercelli Book Dream of the Rood lies in their use of prosopopoeia: in the Crucifixion Poem this rhetorical figure is used to fashion an image of the speaking Cross ‘as the narrative expression of the True Cross of Calvary, which is itself being represented medially by the RC [i.e. Ruthwell Cross]’; in The Dream of the Rood, by contrast, ‘the changed semiotic representation of narration from a multi-medial artefact to a linguistic medium (manuscript) results in a changed diegesis: “the poet speaking in his own voice” (Plato’s diegesis) becomes narrower, while mimesis (“the poet imitating the voice of a character”) becomes broader (the speech of the Cross is now embedded in a dream vision)’ (p. 73). Subsequent chapters focus on the relationship between text, image and memory, the nature of the Roman and runic inscriptions and the monument’s artistic design. A reconstruction and a new edition of the poem is provided in Chapter Seven (pp. 260–362) and Part Two respectively. The volume as a whole constitutes a major contribution to the study of the Ruthwell Cross, our earliest witness to the most admired piece of Old English religious poetry.

Kerstin Majewski is Junior Professor of English Medieval Studies at Ruhr-University Bochum. She received a PhD from Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich in 2021 with a doctoral thesis on the Ruthwell Cross, for which she specialised in Old English and runology. Kerstin is not only interested in historical runes but also in modern adaptations of the runic script (see her 2022 article “Tolkien’s Runes: From Fact to Fiction – A Runologist’s Perspective”, Hither Shore 17 (2020): 77–107). Together with Jan Glück and Markus Krumm she has also published on Medieval Animals Studies (Medieval Animal Studies: Reflexionen, Imaginationen und Praxisformen von Mensch-Tier-Beziehungen im Mittelalter. Das Mittelalter 28.2. Heidelberg University Publishing, 2023). Her further research and teaching concentrate on Old and Middle English language, literature, and culture in general.

2023

The Beatrice White Prize is awarded to Dr Mark Atherton, for his publication The Battle of Maldon: War and Peace in Tenth-Century England (Bloomsbury, 2021). We’ll celebrate Mark’s achievement at the 2023 AGM and Awards Ceremony.

One of the judges commented:

“Remarkably, this is the “first” monograph on one of the most celebrated Old English poems. While it has become fashionable in the past century to read the poem as a critique of military intervention and rash leadership, Atherton’s book resituates the poem firmly within the milieu of the Benedictine Reform and ideas of Christian self-sacrifice. He offers rich insight into the real lives of the men named in the poem and the world in which they moved, bringing to life a corner of late tenth-century England in which aristocratic patrons were deeply involved in the life of the church as well as the business of war and administration. Atherton also presents us with a compelling vision of the poet, who drew on biblical models and alluded to Old English literary classics such as Beowulf in order to create a modern-day hero in the figure of Ealdorman Byrhtnoth. The book is written in a clear and engaging style which will broaden its appeal to students and the general public.”

Mark Atherton grew up in Blackburn, Lancashire; he is Senior College Lecturer in English language and literature at Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford. From 2016 to 2017 he spent a year as Visiting Professor in English Medieval Studies at the University of Düsseldorf in the Rhineland; he revisited old haunts, including nearby Köln (Cologne), where he once spent several years lecturing and teaching English and attempting to acquire the local Kölsch dialect. He is the translator of Hildegard of Bingen: Selected Writings (1999) and author of There and Back Again: J. R. R. Tolkien and the Origins of The Hobbit (2012); he has also published on philology and the study of language in the nineteenth century and on early medieval English history and literature. He has published a historical monograph The Making of England (2017) and a textbook Complete Old English, 3rd edition (2019). Most recent is his The Battle of Maldon: War and Peace in Tenth-Century England (2021), which he followed up with a further article on the use of rhyme in the poem The Battle of Maldon and a field study based on travels in East Anglia and Essex: a ‘landscape biography’ of Ealdorman Byrhtnoth, the hero of the poem.

2022

This year’s recipient of the Prize is Michael Bintley, for his publication Settlements and strongholds in Early Medieval England: texts, landscapes, and material culture (Brepols, 2020).

Michael Bintley is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, London.

2021

This year’s recipient of the Beatrice White Prize is Professor Marion Turner for her publication Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton UP, 2019).

Marion Turner is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, where she is a Tutorial Fellow of Jesus College, and teaches medieval literature and life-writing.  Marion has appeared on many radio and television programmes and often speaks at literary festivals and to schools. Chaucer: A European Life was the first full biography of Chaucer for a generation, and has won numerous accolades (it is the winner of the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay prize, was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize, and was named a Book of the Year by the Times, Sunday Times, TLS, and New Statesman). Marion’s earlier books include Chaucerian Conflict (OUP, 2007) and, as editor, A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). She is a Trustee of the New Chaucer Society. Marion has received major funding in the past from the British Academy, the Wellcome Trust and the Leverhulme Trust. Her next book, also to be published by Princeton University Press, is a biography of the Wife of Bath across time, from antiquity to 2021. In 2023, she will be curating a major exhibition at the Bodleian Library, on ‘Chaucer Here and Now.’

2020

This year’s recipient of the Beatrice White Prize has been awarded to Professor Leonard Neidorf. The Editors wish to recognise Leonard’s important contributions to the field, inlcuding his article ‘Wealhtheow and Her Name: Etymology, Characterization and Textual Criticism’ (Neophilologus, 102, no 1 (January 2018): 75-89).

Leonard Neidorf is Professor of English at Nanjing University, where he teaches courses on medieval literature and the history of the English language. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and his B.A. from New York University. He is the author of The Transmission of Beowulf: Language, Culture, and Scribal Behavior (Cornell University Press, 2017) and the editor of The Dating of Beowulf: A Reassessment (Boydell & Brewer, 2014), which was named an Outstanding Academic Title by CHOICE. With Rafael J. Pascual and Tom Shippey, Neidorf co-edited Old English Philology: Studies in Honour of R.D. Fulk (Boydell & Brewer, 2016). His articles have appeared in such journals as ELH, English Studies, Tolkien Studies, Modern Philology, Anglo-Saxon England,and Journal of Germanic Linguistics.

2019 

The 2019 prize was awarded to Kellie Robertson for Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).

2018