Since 2019 Rosalind Love has been the Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, and is currently Head of Department. She is responsible mainly for the part of the ASNC Tripos that isn’t mentioned in the title, namely Latin – in particular the sub-section of medieval Latin written in early medieval Britain and Ireland. Herself an undergraduate and PhD student and then a postdoc in ASNC, she has taught there since 2001. She was honoured to be elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2024.
Rosalind works on various aspects of the Latin literature produced in early England, with a strong focus on uncovering new texts or providing scholars with editions, translations and interpretations of Latin texts from all periods. She has written extensively, for example, on texts recording the stories of the saints of England – that is, hagiography – and has published two volumes of the series Oxford Medieval Texts making several saints’ Lives accessible to a wider readership, with more volumes in the pipeline.
She has an interest also in the writings of one of Anglo-Saxon England’s most famous figures, the Venerable Bede, in particular the commentaries he wrote on the Bible; she co-authored a translation of his commentary On Samuel, published by Liverpool University Press in 2019, and is currently working on his commentary on the Gospel of Mark. She was also involved in a long-running project to examine the thousands of marginal annotations added to medieval manuscripts of the 6th-century Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, annotations which shed deeply interesting light on how people read and interpreted that crucial test and its exploration of life’s big questions. Another recent project focused on the Latin texts written in the twelfth century about King Arthur and his knights, and about Merlin.