Dr Amanda Holton
Stipendiary Lecturer in Old and Middle English
MA, DPhil (Oxon)
Amanda grew up in Kent, and after attending the local state grammar school read English at Oxford, where she took her undergraduate and graduate degrees. She has taught at Oxford since 1999, and has also worked at the universities of Reading and Southampton. She has held a lectureship in Old and Middle English at Hertford since 2024.
Teaching
Amanda teaches English literature from the early medieval period up to the sixteenth century as well as regularly teaching the history, theory and use of the English language.
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Research interests
Amanda’s principal research interests are in Chaucer, the medieval and sixteenth-century love lyric, and poetics, with an emphasis on how form precedes and generates meaning. She is interested in interrogating the agendas which drive the taxonomy of poetic form, and in challenging the division still made between medieval and early modern literature.
Her book Rhyme and the Construction of Love in English Lyric 1300-1579 was published by Oxford University Press in 2026. It shows that decorum in the choice of vocabulary, combined with the limited rhyme resources of English, render certain clusters of words and ideas almost inevitable, particularly in complex poetic forms demanding large rhyme-groups. As a result, the essentially arbitrary element of rhyme comes to generate features of the experience of love in poetry, and the impression of subjectivity in love lyric is a side-effect of the necessities of rhyme.
The book is accompanied by a database, ‘Rhyme Words in English Love Lyric 1300-1579’.
Amanda is currently working on a new book about anthologies of ‘English verse’ and the fantasies of England they project. This picks up her longstanding interests in poetry anthologies and the agendas which drive the critical framing of texts.
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Selected publications
Rhyme and the Construction of Love in English Lyric 1300-1579 (Oxford University Press, 2026).
‘Chaucer’s presence in Songes and Sonettes’ in Stephen Hamrick (ed.), Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes in Context (Ashgate, 2013), pp. 87-110.
‘An obscured tradition: the sonnet’s relationship to its fourteen-line predecessors’, Review of English Studies 62 (2011), 373-92.
Edition of Tottel’s Miscellany (Penguin Classics, 2011). Co-edited with Tom MacFaul.
The Sources of Chaucer’s Poetics (Ashgate, 2008).
‘Resistance, Regard and Rewriting: Virginia Woolf and Anne Thackeray Ritchie’, English 57 (2008), 42-64.