Peter Dendle

American folklorist

Peter Dendle
Born	United States
Occupation	Writer, author, English professor
Language	English
Genre	Folklore

Peter Dendle is a professor of English at Penn State Mont Alto, teaching classes on folklore, 20th and 21st century representations of the Middle Ages, Old and Middle English (language and literature), and the monstrous (in film, folklore, and society).^[1] Dendle has written books and articles on a number of topics, including cryptozoology, philology, the demonic in literature, zombie movies, and Medieval plants and medicine. His work on zombies was featured by NPR.^[2]

Career

His education includes a B.A. in English and Philosophy (1990) and an M.A. in Philosophy (1993), both from the University of Kentucky, as well as an M.A. in English from Yale (1991) and a PhD in English from the University of Toronto (1998).

In 2007, National Geographic featured some of the research results from Dendle's monograph Demon Possession in Anglo-Saxon England.^[3] Other recent works include peer-reviewed articles on cryptozoology,^[4]^[5] medieval charms,^[6] demon possession, gender in Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon literature,^[7]^[8] and a translation and analysis of The Old English Life of Malchus and Two Vernacular Tales from the Vitas Patrum in MS Cotton Otho C.i: which appeared in English Studies, 2010.^[9]

He is the co-editor of three collections of academic essays on various aspects of the preternatural: Health and Healing from the Medieval Garden (Boydell, 2008), The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (Ashgate, 2012), and The Devil in Society in Premodern Europe (Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2012) with Richard Raiswell (University of Prince Edward Island).

Dendle's The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia (McFarland, 2001) was the first exhaustive overview of the subject, evaluating over 200 movies from 16 countries over a 65-year period starting from the early 1930s. The follow-up volume, The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia, Volume 2: 2000–2010 (McFarland), was published in 2012.

Selected publications

Monographs

Demon Possession in Anglo-Saxon England. Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University. 2014. ISBN 978-1-58044-169-8.
The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia, Volume 2: 2000–2010. McFarland & Company. 2012. ISBN 978-0786461639.
Satan Unbound: The Devil in Old English Narrative Literature. University of Toronto Press. 2001. ISBN 0-8020-4839-0.
The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia. McFarland & Company. 2000. ISBN 0-7864-0859-6.

Edited Collections

Richard Raiswell with Peter Dendle The Devil in Society in Premodern Europe. Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. 2012.
Asa Simon Mittman and Peter Dendle, The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. Ashgate. 2012. ISBN 978-1409407546.
Peter Dendle and Alain Touwaide (eds.). Health and Healing from the Medieval Garden. Boydell & Brewer. 2008. ISBN 978-1-84383-363-5.

References

^ "Peter Dendle" | Penn State Mont Alto
^ "Cinema's (Still) Dead" | On the Media Archived December 1, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
^ "'Devil Possessions'" Swept England After Invasion, Study Suggests" | National Geographic News
^ "Cryptozoology in the Medieval and Modern Worlds" | Folklore
^ "Cryptozoology and the Paranormal in Harry Potter: Truth and Belief at the Borders of Consensus" | Children's Literature Association Quarterly
^ "Textual Transmission of the Old English 'Loss of Cattle' Charm" | The Journal of English and Germanic Philology
^ "Direct Discourse and Gender in the Ágrip af Nóregs konunga sögum" | Neophilologus
^ "How naked is Juliana?" | Philological Quarterly
^ "The Old English “Life of Malchus” and Two Vernacular Tales from the Vitas Patrum in MS Cotton Otho C.i: A Translation" | English Studies