Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament – Published!

Look what I got in the mail today:

MEMPOT Cover — MEMPOT, with Yuengling and iPhone.

Yessir, that there’s my long-awaited (by me and some other geeky Middle English scholars!) edition of The Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament (MEMPOT), available now from Medieval Institute Publications. I’d been told by the press that I’d be getting it soon, but knowing the book existed is nothing compared to the great feeling of pulling it out of the box and holding it.

I knew MEMPOT would be big — as with the The Battle of Brunanburh: A Casebook I did the typesetting and layout myself — but it was nevertheless a bit of a surprise to feel how weighty this book is:

MEMPOT Spine — At 700 pages, the book is 1.5" thick.

A significant chunk of the book was my Ph.D. dissertation, and aside from edits and some final touches I finished the whole thing about four years ago. The book has been with me, shadowing me, for as long as I’ve been at The Citadel.

And here it is. Done. Finished.

Amazing.

I don’t anticipate ever having another summer quite like this one in terms of production. I went ahead and set Brunanburh beside MEMPOT, just to give myself a sense of scale and, to be honest, satisfaction: