Carol Sibson is a retired headmistress, supervised and inspired by Professor Miri Rubin, and now writing up her PhD thesis entitled: ‘Þys tale rymeth hou men in senne beþ: a study of vernacular verse pastoralia for the English laity c.1240-c.1330’.  

She examines texts that form part of the corpus of religious instructional works, pastoralia, which developed throughout Europe after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215.  Her focus is on four case studies, writers of sacramental instruction in Anglo-Norman or Middle English who are mainly targeting the laity; like many other medieval authors, they wrote in verse. 

The earliest work is the Anglo-Norman Corset written c.1240-50 by Robert the Chaplain. The other three authors are roughly contemporaneous, writing in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth centuries: three penitential poems, Pus ke homme deit morir, Tretys de la Passion and Le Char d’Orgueil by Nicholas Bozon; Handlyng Synne, begun in 1303 by Robert Mannyng  and, finally, religious poems by William of Shoreham, written in a Kentish dialect. She would be happy to talk to anyone who has translation problems from Latin/ Old French/Anglo-Norman, or struggles with Middle English via internet courses.