Wendy Matlock

Matlock’s research concentrates on poetic disputes that flourished in Middle English from The Owl and the Nightingale (c. 1275) to The Debate of the Carpenter’s Tools (c. 1500). She is currently completing a monograph, Debating Households in Middle English Poetry, arguing that the collision between the literary/intellectual form of the debate poem and social/economic unit of the household in late medieval England confronts us with narrative conventions markedly different from modern expectations and the inescapable truth that the lived household is always unstable and the ideal household always a negotiation.