Jessica Brantley will present a lecture titled "Learning to Read in the Fourteenth Century: Books of Hours for Children" as part of the George H. Ford Lecture Series. 

Brantley's scholarship focuses on how readers encountered texts and images found in late medieval manuscripts. She is the author of Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England (Chicago, 2007), a study of lyric and drama in illustrated Carthusian miscellany. Her most recent book, Medieval English manuscript and Literary Forms (Penn, 2022), offers an innovative introduction to manuscript culture that uses the artifacts themselves to open some of the mosst vital theoretical questions into medieval literary studies. She is Professor and Chair of English at Yale University.