Jessica Brantley

Jessica Brantley has taught in the Department of English at Yale University since 2000. Before that, she studied at Harvard University (A.B.), Cambridge University (M. Phil.), and UCLA (Ph.D.). Her interests include Old and Middle English literatures, manuscript studies, text/image relations, and the history of the book. She teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses in all of these subjects.

Brantley’s research examines the cultures of medieval reading as they are preserved in manuscripts. Her first book, Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England (University of Chicago Press, 2007), shows that the format of a late-medieval miscellany reveals surprising connections between the private reading of a meditative lyric and the public performance of civic drama. More recently, Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022) offers a method for manuscript study based inductively on a dozen case studies. She is currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled The Book of Hours in English Literary History.