Elizabeth Boyle
Elizabeth Boyle is a historian and lecturer who teaches at Maynooth University in Ireland.
She has previously held a prestigious Leverhulme Fellowship at the University of Cambridge, UK, and a Marie Curie Fellowship at University College Cork. She was awarded her PhD from Cambridge in 2008. Her academic research has been published in international journals such as History of Religions, The Journal of Medieval Latin, Anglo-Saxon England, and Medium Ævum.
Elizabeth’s area of specialism is the history, culture and literature of pre-modern Europe. Her research focuses on Ireland, and she has also published on early medieval Wales and England. She is currently writing a book which seeks to introduce medieval literature to a wider audience, demonstrating its enduring power and resonances in the present day.
She has lectured extensively across Europe and the United States, and in 2020-21 will be an Academic Visitor in the School of English at the University of Nottingham, UK. She loves music – especially extreme metal and experimental noise – and has a teenage daughter.
FIERCE APPETITES, Elizabeth’s captivating and original book, was published by Penguin in March 2022, and became an immediate top ten bestseller in Ireland. It was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards 2022.
“A book of blazing honesty that allows all the gorgeous complexity of the past into our messy present to remind us we've always been like this” -- Max Porter
”Boyle has the skill to move us between the raw and the refined, the mind and the body, the past and the present, the mundane and the marvellous without ever losing control of her dark materials” -- Fintan O'Toole
”I just love it” -- John Connolly
”An eloquent plea for the value of curiosity and the life of the mind, standing up the robustness of scholarship against the frailty of individuals, the resilience of myth against brittle daily preoccupations. It's an agile story, irreverent, capacious and constantly surprising: like nothing else you will read” -- Hilary Mantel
”Pure nectar for the imagination, and it's my book of 2022” -- Clodagh Finn, Irish Examiner