Fierce Appetites: Loving, losing and living to excess in my present and in the writings of the past

Description

A dazzling and irreverent hybrid of memoir and literary reconnaissance by an unconventional scholar For Elizabeth Boyle 2020 began with the death of her beloved father. It was also the year she turned 40 and came to the end of (yet another) relationship. And it was a plague year - something that, as a medieval historian, she understood deeply. The extraordinary collision of personal and professional got her thinking about how the lives and loves of those who lived in the Middle Ages had much to say about her own life and about our present moment. Fierce Appetites is Elizabeth's enthralling account of 2020, a year like no other. Writing a chapter a month, she navigates experiences that are raw and urgent - grief; addiction; family breakdown; the complexities of motherhood, love and sex; memory; class; education; travel (and staying put) - and uses her astounding knowledge of the past to offer insights, consolation and hope for the future. Fierce Appetites is an exhilarating and original journey through the mind and heart of an extraordinary scholar.

Elizabeth Boyle is a medieval historian specialising in the intellectual, literary and religious culture of Britain and Ireland. A former Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge, she is now based in the Department of Early Irish at Maynooth University, where she was Head of Department from 2015-20. Fierce Appetites is her debut collection of personal essays.

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 Really REALLY good -- Siobhan McSweeney 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 An astounding piece of writing -- David Perry Just as brilliant and hard to define as everyone says it is. You should read it. You will both learn things and be entertained -- Jan Carson