Dr Sarah Bowden

Sarah Bowden is a medievalist with a particular interest in the literary culture of the German lands in the 11th and 12th centuries. She studied in Cambridge, Freiburg im Breisgau and Cologne, and joined King's as Lecturer in German in 2012 after a research fellowship in Oxford.

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

• 11^th- and 12^th-century literary and manuscript culture
• Penitential theology
• Middle High German epic and romance
• Genre and literary history
• European cult of St Oswald

Sarah’s research centres on the literary culture of the German lands in the Middle Ages. Her first monograph, Bridal-Quest Epics in Medieval Germany: A Revisionary Approach (2012), offers a major reappraisal of one of the canonical, yet problematic, genres of medieval German literature, and is connected to her wider interest in the history of scholarship on medieval literature as well as the ways and means in which we categorize and label texts.

Sarah’s current research focuses on the literary culture of the German lands in the 11^th and 12^th centuries. She is particularly interested in the development of German as a literary language and the relationship between German and Latin; in the emergence of a discourse of vernacular religious poetry; and in the manuscript transmission of German-language writing in the 12^th century. Her next monograph, provisionally entitled Writing Sin: Text and Confession in the German Lands, 1050–1200, deals with these areas of interest through the lens of attitudes towards (and writing about) sin, confession and penance. In 2018 Sarah was awarded a Fellowship for Experienced Researchers by the Humboldt Foundation to work on this project. She is involved in related projects on temporalities and medieval poetic anthologies, working together with colleagues in the UK, Europe and USA.

Sarah is co-Principal Investigator (with Susanne Friede, Bochum) on the project 'Sacred Secular', funded by the Thyssen Foundation. She is also Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded project 'Liturgical and literary landscapes: the cult of St Oswald of Northumbria in the German-speaking world' (PI Johanna Dale, UCL). Sarah welcomes enquiries from potential PhD students in medieval German literature. For more details, please see her full research profile.

Teaching

Sarah teaches undergraduate and postgraduate modules on medieval literature and culture. She also enjoys teaching translation.

Expertise and Public Engagement

Sarah has organised and been involved with a wide range of outreach activities for language learners. As part of her project 'Liturgical and Literary Landscapes' she is involved in a range of public engagement projects in the Peterborough area. She has appeared on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time, discussing the medieval German epic 'The Nibelungenlied'. She is one of the Faculty's inaugural Impact Fellows.

Selected publications

Bridal-Quest Epics in Medieval Germany: A Revisionary Approach

Bowden, S., 2012, London: Modern Humanities Research Association. (Modern Humanities Research Association. Texts and dissertations; vol. v. 83)(Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies (University of London). Bithell series of dissertations; vol. v. 40)

Punishment and Penitential Practices in Medieval German Writing

Bowden, S. (ed.) & Volfing, A. (ed.), 2018, Boydell & Brewer Ltd. (King's College London Medieval Studies)

Performing didacticism in Early Middle High German Poetry: Poet, audience and creed in Arme Hartmann’s Rede von deme heiligen gelouben

Bowden, S. K., 2019 Prozesse et delectare: Case Studies on Didactic Literature in the European Middle Ages /Fallstudien zur didaktischen Literatur des europäischen Mittelalters. Kössinger, N. & Wittig, C. (eds.). de Gruyter, (Das Mittelalter. Perspektiven mediävistischer Forschung. Beihefte; vol. 11), pp. 85–101