Hannah Lucas

Hannah Lucas received her DPhil in English Literature from the University of Oxford in 2020, where her doctoral thesis on the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich won the Swapna Dev Memorial Book Prize. She was subsequently the Newby Trust Research Fellow at Newnham College, University of Cambridge. Currently, she holds an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship jointly based at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the Technical University Berlin. Her work lies at the intersection of medieval literature, philosophy, theology, and the medical humanities.

Her research addresses questions of religious and mystical experience, language, and well-being, focused especially on the connections between the medieval and the modern. She is the author of Impossible Recovery: Julian of Norwich and the Phenomenology of Well-Being (Columbia UP, 2025), which explores the entanglement of illness and revelation phenomena, and their significance for post-Heideggerian philosophies of health. She has also published numerous articles in academic journals on topics from medieval medicine to mysticism and AI, and she convenes the research network contemplation: theory / practice.

This project addresses the premodern histories of attentive reading, devotional practice, and literary theory, investigating how contemporary debates about literary methods—particularly the perceived opposition between ‘surface reading‘ and ‘symptomatic reading‘—reproduce elements of medieval theology and hermeneutics.

Drawing on literary theory, material text studies, and cognitive science, the project explores how vernacular devotional texts from medieval England manifest sophisticated theoretical engagements with questions of interpretative scale and meaning-making. It focuses on Middle English religious texts like The Chastising of God’s Children, The Cloud of Unknowing, The Myroure of oure Ladye, and The Orcherd of Syon, all of which are concerned with their reader’s ability to read and understand the contemplative practices they espouse. Set against the turbulent politics of pre-Reformation England, these texts show how questions of literary method are always already questions about attention and the proper scale of reading, and that the premodern can help theorise reduction, not as limitation, but as productive calibration of interpretive focus.