Daniel Davies
Solmsen Fellow (2024-2025)
Assistant Professor, English, University of Houston
Under Siege: Perpetual Warfare and Late-Medieval Literature
Under Siege seeks to reframe how we understand late medieval English literature’s relationship to war. Rather than treating war as occasional disruption or backdrop, the project demonstrates how war functioned as a constant condition that shaped literary production. This perpetual war framework offers a new lens for reading major medieval texts, challenging assumptions that systematic thinking about war emerged only in later periods. The project reveals how medieval literary texts were not simply recycling classical ideas, but actively engaging with contemporary wartime experiences through dynamic networks connecting poets, statesmen, and philosophers across Europe. It uncovers previously unrecognized dimensions of well-studied texts by major authors like Geoffrey Chaucer and Thomas Hoccleve, showing how works not explicitly about war nevertheless reflect and engage with wartime mentalities and experiences in subtle but significant ways that reshape our understanding of medieval literary culture.
Daniel Davies is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Houston, where his research centers on late-medieval literary and historical writing. His research has appeared in journals including Modern Language Quarterly, New Medieval Literatures, and The Chaucer Review. With R.D. Perry he is co-editor of Literatures of the Hundred Years War, available Open Access from Manchester University Press. He recently completed a Houston-based public humanities project called Space City Medievalism and he is currently editing a special issue of The Journal of Early Modern and Medieval Studies on ‘Epistemologies of the Archive.’
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