For nearly two decades I taught and wrote about late medieval English literature, especially Chaucer and religious culture.
Books
The Porous Subject: Domestic Confession and Neighbor Love in Late Medieval England
Cornell University Press, 2027
In late medieval England, confession was not only a private, inward act, but also a domestic one: a practice in and of the household. It focused on neighbour love and imagined a porous subjectivity, open to others without losing its shape. The Porous Subject shows how domestic confession and its call to porous subjectivity present a real challenge to devotional writers, to secular poets, and to us. It also asks what these medieval ideas might teach us now, when the boundaries of the self feel both anxious and urgent.
The book at Cornell University Press
Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England
University of Toronto Press, 2013
The book at University of Toronto Press
Selected articles
- “Dorigen’s Boundless Subjectivity in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale.” With Holly A. Crocker. PMLA 140 (2025).
- “Afterword: Co-creating Objects of Belief.” In Objects of Belief, ed. Joshua Easterling and Fiona Somerset. Manchester University Press, 2025.
- “The Pardoner, Domestic Confession, and Porous Subjectivity.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 46 (2024).
- “On Chaucer, Raptus, and the Physician’s Tale.” Exemplaria 35 (2023). One of the journal’s most-read articles.
- “It Was for Noght: Death and the Problem of Absence in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess.” The Chaucer Review 57 (2022).
- “Learning to Live in Communities: Household Confession and Medieval Forms of Living.” New Medieval Literatures 22 (2022).
- “Penitential Discourse in Hoccleve’s Series.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 34 (2012).
Full list of publications: ORCID · Academia.edu
Publications before 2020 appear under the name Robyn Malo.
Talks
- “Peter Idley’s Buffered Porosity.” Symposium on Peter Idley, Wolfson College, Cambridge, February 2027 (forthcoming).
- “The Gift of Attention: Porous Subjectivity and Neighbour Love.” Venit, vidit, Vincent: A Colloquium in Honour of Vincent Gillespie, University of Oxford, July 2026.
- “Chaucer’s Vulnerable Wife of Bath?” International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, May 2024.
- “Block this Contact? The Pardoner, Domestic Confession, and Porous Subjectivity.” Sewanee Medieval Colloquium, April 2022.
- “The Form and Function of St Brendan’s Confession.” Yale Lectures in Medieval Studies, Yale University, October 2016.
Current research
I’m thinking about the soundscape of medieval and early modern London, and about the long cultural history of mirrors.
