H. (Hiske) Feenstra, MA

The Skelton Project

The Skelton Project is an internationally acclaimed academic project which functions as the body of reference for the late medieval poet John Skelton. It provides information on the sociocultural, historical, and contextual background of John Skelton’s English works. Through a website, Facebook, and Twitter, The Skelton Project actively generates an awareness of John Skelton's life and works and late-medieval English literature and language in general. 

The Project is developed for a wide-ranging audience with particular aim at undergraduate students. The website provides online Middle English editions for all of Skelton’s English poems with elaborate glosses in modern English. Each edition, moreover, is equipped with detailed explanatory notes containing scholarly information about the poems. Next to online editions, the website provides educational videos in which the poems are visualized.

One of these videos, "Speke Parrot", has created a renewed interest in John Skelton's poetry and the Middle English language with a general audience. The video was trending on Reddit and quickly took on a life of its own. The video went viral multiple times in the previous years and has currently reached a total amount of more than 1 millions views!

Press:
- BBC 
- The Independent 
- Stephen Fry about the Skelton Project 
- Universiteitskrant (Dutch)