Mike Bintley

About:

Mike Bintley is a historian of the literature and material culture of the Middle Ages, and Associate Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Southampton. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Mike researches, teaches, and writes about the landscapes and environments of the early Middle Ages. He is especially interested in the relationship between texts and archaeology, ecotheory and ecocriticism, trees and plant life, bodies of water, and settlements.

Contact: m.bintley [at] soton.ac.uk

Books:

Trees in the Religions of Early Medieval England (Boydell, 2015)
Andreas: an Edition, ed. and trans. with Richard North (Liverpool UP, 2016)
Settlements and Strongholds in Early Medieval England: Texts, Landscapes, and Material Culture (Brepols, 2020), winner of the Beatrice White Award from the English Association (2022)
Landscapes and Environments of the Middle Ages, with Kate Franklin (Routledge, 2023)
An Anthology of Trees and Plant Life in the Earliest English Poetry: Treow Forms (in preparation for Liverpool University Press)
Encounters: The Medieval Natural World in 50 Objects, with Kate Franklin (in preparation for Routledge)

Edited Collections:

Trees and Timber in the Anglo-Saxon World, with Michael Shapland (Oxford UP, 2013)
Representing Beasts in Early Medieval England and Scandinavia, with Thomas J. T. Williams (Boydell, 2015)
Sensory Perception in the Medieval West, with Simon Thomson (Brepols, 2016)
Stasis in the Medieval West?: Questioning Change and Continuity, with Victoria Symons and Mary Wellesley (Palgrave, 2017)
Insular Iconographies: Essays in Honour of Jane Hawkes, with Meg Boulton (Boydell, 2019)
Transitions and Relationships Over Land and Sea in the Early Middle Ages of Northern Europe, with Andrew Richardson, John Hines, Andy Seaman, and Ellen Swift (Isle Heritage, 2023)
Trees as Symbol and Metaphor in the Middle Ages: Comparative Contexts, with Pippa Salonius (Boydell, 2024), winner of Best Book in Medieval Art from the Centre for Early Medieval Studies, Brno (2024)
Plant Temporalities, special issue of Medieval Ecocriticisms 5, with Anke Bernau (2025)

Selected Chapters and Articles:

With Kate Franklin, ‘Territories and Landscapes’, A Cultural History of Nature in the Medieval Era, ed. K. Robertson and A. Bernau (Bloomsbury, 2025)
‘Permeable Bodies, Extended Minds, and the Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda’, Eco-Norse: Essays on Old Norse Literature and the Environment, ed. T. Bourns and C. Phelpstead (VSNR, 2025)
‘Thicket: Trees and Belief in Britain After Rome’, Ecologizing Late Ancient and Byzantine Worlds, ed. L. Borghetti and T. Arentzen (Bloomsbury, 2025), 163-76
‘Plant Lives in the Literatures of Medieval England', The Cambridge Handbook of Literature and Plants, ed. B. Lander Johnson (CUP, 2025), 52-67
‘Fluid Dynamics: Aquatic Agency in the Poetic Edda of the Codex Regius’, Water in the Middle Ages, ed. M. Cesario, H. Magennis, and E. Ramazzina (Brill, 2024), 227-52
‘Trees of Life in Old English and Old Norse Literatures’, Sacra Silva: Bosco e Dimensione Religiosa Tra Tardoantico e Medioevo, ed. by F. Carta, R. Michetti, C. Noce (Viella, 2024), 81-98
‘Beowulf’s Foliate Margins: The Surrounding Forest in Early Medieval England’, Trees as Symbol and Metaphor in the Middle Ages: Comparative Contexts (Boydell, 2024), 66-85
‘Borders, Burials, and the Extended Mind in Early Medieval England: Genesis A and Apple Down’, Open Library of Humanities, 9.1 (2023), 1-24
With Leonie Hicks, ‘Landscapes of Concealment and Revelation in the Brut Narratives: Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace and Laȝamon’, Anglo-Norman Studies XLIV: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 2021, ed. by S. D. Church (Boydell, 2022), 137-51
‘Aquas ab Aquis: Aqueous Creation in Andreas’, Meanings of Water in Early Medieval England, ed. C. Twomey and D. Anlezark (Brepols, 2021), 159-75
‘Britons, Romans, and the Construction of "Anglo-Saxon" Identity’, Celts, Romans, Britons: Classical and Celtic Influence in Britain, 55BC-2016AD, ed. F. Kaminski-Jones and R. Kaminski-Jones (OUP, 2021), 31-49
‘Hrinde bearwas: The Trees at the Mere and the Root of All Evil in Beowulf’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 119.3 (2020), 309-26
‘Reading Early Medieval Landscape and Environment: Materially Engaged Approaches to Documentary Sources’, Reading the Natural World in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. T. Willard (Brepols, 2020), 3-20
‘The Stones of the Wall Will Cry Out: Lithic Emissaries and Marble Messengers in Andreas’, Insular Iconography: Essays in Honour of Jane Hawkes (Boydell and Brewer, 2019), 61-80
‘“How deserted Lies the City, Once So Full of People”: The Reclamation of Intramural Space in Anglo-Saxon Literature’, Place and Space in the Medieval World, ed. M. Boulton, J. Hawkes, and H. Stoner (Routledge, 2018), 63-73
‘Beacons of Belief: Seasonal Change and Sacred Trees in Britain from Prehistory to the Later Middle Ages’, Stasis in the Medieval West? (Palgrave, 2017), 27-45
‘Plant Life in the Poetic Edda’, Sensory Perception in the Medieval West (Brepols, 2016), 227-44
‘Where are the Wics in Old English Poetry?: Settlements in Transition’, The Art, Literature and Material Culture of the Medieval World: Transition, Transformation and Taxonomy, ed. M. Boulton, J. Hawkes and M. Herman (Four Courts, 2015), 153-63
‘Where the Wild Things Are in Old English Poetry’, Representing Beasts in Early Medieval England and Scandinavia (Boydell, 2015), 205-28
‘The Translation of St Oswald’s Relics to New Minster, Gloucester: Royal and Imperial Resonances’, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History, 19 (2015), 171-81
‘Brungen of Bearwe: Ploughing Common Furrows in Riddle 21, The Dream of the Rood, and the Æcerbot Charm’, Trees and Timber in the Anglo-Saxon World (OUP, 2013), 144-57
‘Recasting the Role of Sacred Trees in Anglo-Saxon Spiritual History: The South Sandbach Cross ‘Ancestors of Christ’ Panel in its Cultural Contexts’, Trees and Timber in the Anglo-Saxon World (OUP, 2013), 211-27
‘Material Culture: Archaeology and Text’, Beowulf and Other Stories, 2nd edn, ed. Richard North and Joe Allard (Pearson, 2011), 246-73
‘Landscape Gardening: Remodelling the Hortus Conclusus in Judgement Day II’, Review of English Studies, 62. 253 (2011), 1-14
‘Demythologising Urban Landscapes in Andreas’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 40 (2009), 105-18