Amy Appleford
Amy Appleford received her doctorate from the University of Western Ontario in 2005 and is presently an assistant professor of English at Boston University. Her research interests include pre-modern religion and literature, legal, institutional, and urban history, and the philosophy and culture of death, medieval and modern.
"Learning to Die in London, 1350-1530"
Dr. Appleford’s current book project, Learning to Die in London, 1350-1530, is a study of death in English literary, religious, and civic culture in the late medieval and early Reformation period. Witnessing the death of neighbor and kin was a praxis deeply rooted in early Christian culture and newly textualized in the late medieval ‘arts’ of dying. The demands and rituals of death literally built fifteenth-century London: its hospitals, schools, libraries, public art, and many of its literary and didactic texts. For poets and other cultural makers, death was a crucial resource for poetic, psychological and political analysis and expression.
