Sebastian Sobecki

Sebastian Sobecki is Professor of Medieval English Literature and Culture at Groningen University. He was educated at the University of Cambridge and came to the Netherlands from McGill University. Sobecki specialises in English literature from Chaucer to the Reformation; scribes and manuscripts; law, travel, political writing, intellectual history, and Anglo-European contact.

His books include Last Words: The Public Self and the Social Author in Late Medieval England (Oxford UP, 2019); Unwritten Verities: The Making of England’s Vernacular Legal Culture, 1463-1549 (Notre Dame UP, 2015); The Sea and Medieval English Literature (D.S. Brewer, 2008); Medieval English Travel: A Critical Anthology, ed. with Anthony Bale (Oxford UP, 2019); The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Law and Literature, ed. with Candace Barrington (Cambridge UP, 2019); A Critical Companion to John Skelton, ed. with John Scattergood (D.S. Brewer, 2018); The Sea and Englishness in the Middle Ages (D.S. Brewer, 2011); An Edition of Miles Hogarde’s A Mirroure of Myserie, 1557 (Punctum Books, 2020), and the first two volumes of the Oxford edition of Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (in press). His articles have appeared in Speculum, ELH, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Renaissance Studies, The English Historical Review, The Chaucer Review, and The Review of English Studies, among others. Together with Michelle Karnes, he is the editor of Studies in the Age of Chaucer. He is currently editing a substantial literary history, Medieval Travel Writing: A Global History for Cambridge UP.

Sobecki was awarded the 2016 John Hurt Fisher Prize and has received grants and fellowships from All Souls College, Oxford; Yale University; the Huntington Library; NWO; SSHRC; Québec's FQRSC; and DFG.

He sits on the Advisory Committee for the Index of Middle English Prose. Sobecki is the voice behind the popular Speke, Parott! YouTube video.