Pauline Matarasso is a scholar, translator, and poet with a particular interest in medieval history and literature focused on the Benedictine tradition, though her subjects are wide-ranging and embrace the French prose poet Christian Bobin and the modernist writer Sylvia Townsend Warner. She has spent most of her life in rural settings in England and France, much of it on working farms. She is an oblate of Howton Grove Priory, near Hereford. Among other books she has written and edited, she is the translator and editor of The Cistercian World: Monastic Writings of the Twelfth Century (Penguin, 1993) and translator of John of Forde's The Life of Wulfric of Haselbury, Anchorite (CF 79; Cistercian Publications, 2011).

Contents

Acknowledgments
Clothed in Language
Sighing and Prophesighing
i. Alpha and Omega
ii. The Words We Use
iii. Small Talk
iv. The Sheep of His Flock
v. Afterword
Reading Between the Lines