Abigail Sprenkle

Abigail Sprenkle

Assistant Professor
WMS 325
av18b@fsu.edu
Old English literature, Middle English literature, Old Norse literature, medieval Latin, law and literature, medieval legal studies, history of Englishes, linguistics, postcolonial studies, gender studies, the Global Middle Ages

Abigail (Abby) Sprenkle, Assistant Professor, Ph.D. Cornell University (2021), B.A. Smith College (2014), specializes in Old English literature, law, and legal culture. Her research uses postcolonial theories to interrogate the roles royal legal rhetoric played in building early medieval ethnic, national, and gender identities. She is particularly interested in disrupting the popular understanding of medieval communities as homogenous, and that such cultural uniformity would even be desirable for leaders and members of those communities. Dr. Sprenkle’s work not only reads law as a form of literature but also analyzes Old English literature alongside legal texts to compare how both approached questions of authority, violence, cultural contact, and gender roles. She is currently working on a manuscript on rhetorics of hybridity in Old English law codes and expanding her research to the period immediately after the Norman Conquest of 1066.

Teaching interests also include Middle English literature, Chaucer, global Arthurian legends, Medieval travel literature, Norse sagas and poetry, chivalric tales, and medievalisms.

Publications

  • “Negotiating Gender in Snorri’s Edda: A Reading of the Skaði Episodes,” JEGP (2020). Published under the name Abby Sprenkle.

Works in Progress

  • “Grendel’s Mother’s Bad Exchange: Beowulf’s Anxieties about Hybrid Feuding Cultures.”