Professor
College of Letters & Science | Department of English
Lisa H. Cooper is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she specializes in the literature and culture of late medieval England; her scholarly investments lie particularly in the intertwined histories of labor, technology, science, material culture, and the practices of daily life from the twelfth through fifteenth centuries. She is the author of Artisans and Narrative Craft in Late Medieval England (Cambridge UP, 2011; paperback, 2014), and with Professor Andrea Denny-Brown (UC-Riverside) she is co-editor of Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century (Palgrave, 2008) and The Arma Christi in Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture (Ashgate, 2014). She is finishing her second monograph, provisionally entitled The Poetics of Practicality in Late Medieval England.
Talks:
Knives Out: Medieval Recipes, Violence, and Literary Character
This talk explores how the inherent violence of medieval culinary technique left its traces not only in the recipes of late medieval England, but also in the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer.
The Poetics of Practicality in Late Medieval England
This talk discusses the many ways in which poetry met practical life in late medieval England, from recipe collections to medical texts, agricultural tracts to astronomical manuals, hunting treatises, and more.
Fish, Laundry, Cheese, and Gold: Alchemy and the Everyday
This talk explores the way that one well-known alchemical poem, Thomas Norton’s Ordinal of Alchemy (1477), uses the language of everyday experience to convey alchemical knowledge.