Dr Jenni Nuttall is an academic who’s been teaching and researching medieval literature at the University of Oxford for the last twenty years, and who has had a lot of practice at making old words interesting. She has a DPhil from Oxford and completed the University of East Anglia’s MA in Creative Writing. She is the author of a readers’ guide to Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde with Cambridge University Press and she is contributing a chapter on ‘Literary Language’ for the Fifteenth Century volume of the Oxford History of Poetry in English, edited by Julia Boffey and A S G Edwards. Mother Tongue is her book first for the general reader.