After studying for an undergraduate degree in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Cambridge, Dr Nicholas Perkins moved into the later medieval period for his graduate research, which centred around the early fifteenth-century bureaucrat, poet and melancholic Thomas Hoccleve. He still works on aspects of Hoccleve’s writing and political literature in the late middle ages. His other research interests include manuscripts and readers of Middle English poetry, the uses that medieval writers made of the Bible, and a current major project on gifts and narratives in the medieval period. He curated an exhibition at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, called The Romance of the Middle Ages, and hosted the 2012 Romance in Medieval Britain conference. He is also interested in modern creative responses to the medieval past.