Middle English at the University of Stavanger
The Middle English Scribal Texts Programme (MEST) is a research programme based at UiS, with focus on late medieval texts and writers in their social and historical context.
About us
Medieval English developed from a meeting of cultures and populations, formed by a multilingual and socially diverse history. As a written language, it shows extreme variation, reflecting both the diversity of its origins and a lack of enforced standards.
As a research group we focus on late medieval English in its geographical and historical context.
This site contains information about our projects. It also contains two corpora: The Middle English Grammar Corpus (MEG-C) and A Corpus of Middle English Local Documents (MELD). From January 2025, we are working on a new ERC-funded project, LiTra (Linguistic traces: low-frequency forms as evidence of language and population history).
The most striking fact about Middle English is that it exhibits by far the greatest diversity in written language of any period before or since
Our Research
Contact and visit us
Department of Cultural Studies and Languages
Department of Cultural Studies and Languages
The MEST team is housed in Hagbard Lines Hus (HL A-238) in the middle of the UiS main campus.
We are happy to welcome colleagues and visitors for a coffee and chat or a browse through our library.
We arrange regular talks and events on campus, which are usually open to everyone.
Hosting visiting researchers
We are happy to consider hosting visiting researchers with related research interests. If you wish to apply for a fellowship through external funding sources, possible options might be MSCA postdoctoral fellowships, Research Council of Norway international postdocs and various PhD mobility grants. Please get in touch if you are thinking of applying for external funding or would simply like to visit us.