Helen Waddell Reassessed

The Irish writer and critic Helen Waddell burst onto the publishing scene of the 1920s and 1930s as a phenomenon, a scholar whose books became instant bestsellers. Cross-fertilizing academic research with a vivid imagination, her literary history The Wandering Scholars explores the secular joys of the scholares vagantes , an emotional undercurrent traceable throughout the ascetic centuries. Waddell’s translations of Mediaeval Latin Lyrics read as poems in their own right; her novel, Peter Abelar