Project Members

Current Project Members

Geert De Wilde (Chief Editor and Project Leader, 2003-present)
Delphine Demelas (Editor, 2020-present)
Karen Jankulak (Editorial Assistant, 2023-present)
Brian Aitken (System Developer and Technical Consultant, 2020-present)

Advisory Board: Richard Ashdowne (DMLBS), Paul Brand (Oxford), Paul Dryburgh (The National Archives), Philip Durkin (OED), Yan Greub (CNRS), Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Fordham), Ian Short (ANTS), Marianne Ailes (Bristol), Daron Burrows (ANTS) and Laura Wright (Cambridge)

External Readers: Richard Ashdowne, Paul Brand, Ian Short and Heather Pagan

Former AND2 project members

†William Rothwell (General Editor, 1963-2013)
†David A. Trotter (Chief Editor and Project Leader, 1986-2015)
Heather Pagan (Editor and Deputy Project Leader, 2008-2023)
†Michael Beddow (Technical Consultant, 2000-18)
Megan Tiddeman (Editorial Assistant, 2017-19)
Maud Becker (PhD student and Research Assistant, 2015-16)
Katariina Närä-Zanotti (Assistant Editor, 2013-15)
Jennifer Gabel de Aguirre (Research Assistant, 2011-12)
Larissa Birrer (Research Assistant, 2010)
Natasha Romanova (Research Assistant National Archives Project, 2007-08)
Virginie Derrien (Assistant Editor, 2003-08)

AND Textbase

Andrew Rothwell (Director of Digitisation, 2000-07)

Technical Support Officers (2002-07): Tom Richens, Siân Pilborough, Jenny Lyon and Russell Kneath

Historical Project Members (AND1)

†Louise W. Stone
†T.B.W. Reid
†Dafydd Evans
†Paul Staniforth
†Stewart Gregory
†J.P. Collas
Lisa Jefferson


Geert De Wilde studied at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the University of Leeds. He was awarded a PhD in 2002 for research on The Stanza Form of the Vernon/Simeon Lyrics, and its Relation to Earlier Middle English, Anglo-Norman and Continental French Models. After a Research Fellowship with the Brotherton Library’s Digitised Medieval Palaeography Project, he joined the AND editorial team in 2003, where, in addition to the central task of revising entries from F onwards, he has been closely involved in developing the editorial policies and organisation of the AND, while promoting awareness within and beyond academic circles of the importance of Anglo-Norman. He became Project Leader in 2015. He has published an English translation of a Brut Chronicle, and is currently working on editions of Nicholas Trevet’s Anglo-Norman Chronicle and the Anglo-Norman translation of St Jerome’s letter to Paulinus and General Preface to the Old Testament. He is the author of the AND Bibliography, published online in 2021.
Back

Delphine Demelas studied and taught at Aix-Marseille University where she obtained her PhD for research on an edition of La Chanson de Bertrand du Guesclin (14th-15th c), a middle French epic text, using the LaTeX language. She has taught French and medieval literature and conducted research in Paraguay and the USA about French epic texts and codicology. Her publications deal with the evolution of the epic genre during Middle Ages, the use of medieval manuscripts after the Middle Ages, and on manuscripts produced after the Middle Ages as for example the Paraguayan Book of Gold (‘Libro de Oro’). She joined the AND project as Assistant Editor in March 2020 to work on the revision of letter S. She is currently working on an edition of the Anglo-Norman version of La Chanson d’Otinel (12th-13th c.).
Back

Karen Jankulak, FRHistS, gained her PhD from the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, in 1996, with a dissertation on The Medieval Cult of St Petroc. After a period teaching and working as a copy-editor on the Dictionary of Old English in Toronto, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, then Lecturer/Senior Lecturer at the University of Wales Lampeter (later Trinity Saint David). She has published two books The Medieval Cult of St Petroc (Boydell) and Geoffrey of Monmouth (Writers of Wales). She is currently planning an edition of a Latin text on the resting-places of saints.
Back

Brian Aitken graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1999 with an MA(Hons) in English Language before completing an MSc in Information Technology in 2001.  He joined the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow as Digital Humanities Research Officer in 2012 and has developed systems and online resources for around 50 research projects, including The Historical Thesaurus of English, the Dictionary of the Scots Language, the Scots Syntax Atlas, the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech and several place-name projects such as the Berwickshire Place-Name Resource. A list of Brian’s projects can be viewed here.
Back


William Rothwell was educated at Oxford and went on to study Medieval French with Wagner and Provençal with Boutière at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris. A lectureship at the University of Leeds led to a Readership in Medieval French at the same university and then to the Chair of French Language at Manchester University, from which he retired in 1982. He worked on the first edition of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary from 1963 to the completion of the First Edition in 1992 and became General Editor of the first fascicles of the Revised Edition. He was principally responsible for letters B, C and D of AND2, and assumed responsibility for completing the revision of E on the basis of Stewart Gregory’s work. He continued for several years to advise on matters arising from the work on entries from F onwards, until ill-health began to limit his capacity for active participation in the 2010s.
Although the Dictionary embodies the knowledge and skills of many scholars worldwide, it was above all his vision, energy and determination that shaped and guided the undertaking in its growth towards the scope and standing it enjoys today. He died peacefully in Swansea in October 2016, aged 94.
Back

David Trotter, who studied at Oxford and Paris and had his first academic post at the University of Exeter, was Professor of French and Head of the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Aberystwyth from 1993 until his untimely death in 2015. As well as leading the Anglo-Norman Hub project, he took particular responsibility for Letter A of the revised Dictionary. He then worked closely with the postdoctoral Editors as they compiled the revised entries from F to O/U.
This site, along with the research it embodies and fosters, was only one facet of his achievements, the breadth of which is stated in the obituary by Andrew Rothwell.
Back

Heather Pagan studied at Waterloo and Toronto before joining the AND project in 2008 at the start of the revision of letter J onwards. From 2015 she became Deputy Project Leader. She has produced editions of the Short Version of the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut to 1332 (ANTS 69, 2011) and the Anglo-Norman Brut Chronicle in CUL Dd.10.32. In February 2017, she became lecturer in English Language and Linguistics in the Department of English Linguistics and Cultural Studies at Westminster University, and started working part-time for the Anglo-Norman Dictionary. She left the project in 2023 during the revision of T-.
Back

Michael Beddow studied at Cambridge and Tübingen and held lecturing posts at Cambridge and London before being appointed to the Chair of German at the University of Leeds, from which he retired in 1998. He designed and implemented the server infrastructure of the Dictionary, as well as the software systems by which entries are created, indexed, delivered and maintained. He also specified the XML mark-up of the Dictionary and its associated Textbase, supervised its application, and developed the software by which the Textbase can be browsed and searched. He monitored the operation of the editing and delivery until ill health prevented him towards the end of 2018. He passed away 2 September 2019, and his obituary can be found here.
Back

Andrew Rothwell studied at Oxford, Strasbourg and Paris before taking up his first lecturing post at the University of Exeter, followed by twelve years as Lecturer and later Senior Lecturer in the Department of French at the University of Leeds. Since 1999 he has been Professor of French and Head of the French Department at the University of Swansea. He devised and directs the Swansea MA in Translation with Language Technology, and has had general responsibility for the computerisation of the AND project 2000-2007, including the creation of the machine-readable corpus of sources which is now the basis of much of the Editors’ work.
Back

Megan Tiddeman graduated from the University of St Andrews in 2002 with an MA in French and Italian. After completing a PGCE, she taught Modern Languages for seven years at St Leonards School and IB College. She was awarded a PhD in Historical Linguistics at Aberystwyth University in January 2017 for a thesis analysing multilingualism and Italian/Anglo-Norman language contact in medieval merchant documents. As Editorial Assistant to the AND (2017-19), Megan Tiddeman was responsible for the dating of source materials and applying these dates to online citations, which contributed to the conversion of the AND into a historical dictionary, published in 2020.
Back

Maud Becker graduated from the University of Neuchatel in 2013 with an MA in Romance Philology, Historical French Linguistics, and Medieval French Literature. She held a research studentship funded by Aberystwyth University under the aegis of the AND, with her Ph.D project being a critical edition of an Anglo-Norman verse continuation of Wace’s Roman de Brut in British Library Cotton Vitellius A. X. During the course of her Ph.D. she contributed to the addition of cross-references to cognate dictionaries (2015-16).
Back

Katariina Närä-Zanotti joined the project as a post-doctoral research assistant for a two-year fixed term starting in April 2013. In addition to work on developing and applying the new system of semantic labelling for AND senses, she was responsible for adding cross-references to cognate dictionaries in all AND entries beginning with letters F to N.
Back

Jennifer Gabel de Aguirre joined the Dictionary team in January 2011 and remained until March 2012 as a part-time research assistant funded by a grant from the AHRC and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (2009-2012). Her contributions to the revision of the Dictionary included the gleaning of Anglo-Norman source texts. During this time she completed her doctorate: an edition and lexical study of the Anglo-Norman manuscripts of Baudri de Bourgueil’s crusade chronicle.
Back

Larissa Birrer was awarded a Zürich MA for a linguistic analysis of the authors of 290 Meurthe-et-Moselle charters from 1232-1265, and completed her doctoral dissertation – an edition of the thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman dreambook Songes selon Daniel, a translation of the Achmetis Oneirocriticon – in 2010. With funding from the Zeno Karl Schindler Stiftung, she spent January to September 2010 at Aberystwyth, completing her dissertation and working as a part-time Research Assistant on the Dictionary.
Back

Natasha Romanova studied French Philology and European and American Literatures at Moscow State University, followed by research at University College London on the medieval French ‘idyllic’, for which she was awarded a PhD in 2007. She came to Aberystwyth in February 2007 to work on a one-year AHRC-funded project ‘Anglo-Norman in the National Archives’ which provided a significant contribution to the Dictionary and to the study of Anglo-Norman lexis in general. The findings of her research provided numerous new attestations as well as new entries throughout the Dictionary.
Back

Virginie Derrien joined the AND Project in 2003, having previously been a member of the “Charrette” digitisation project (Princeton/Poitiers) and taught Romance Philology at Poitiers (France). During her five years with the AND she was responsible for the revision of approximately half of the entries under the letters F, G, H, and I.
Back