Andrew Taylor is Professor of English at the University of Ottawa. His research concentrates on the history of reading, especially leisure and contemplative reading, and on the history of minstrel performance. He is the author of Textual Situations: Three Medieval Manuscripts and Their Readers (2002) and The Songs and Travels of a Tudor Minstrel: Richard Sheale of Tamworth (2012). He has co-edited The Idea of the Vernacular (1999), The Future of the Page (2004), and The Canterbury Tales (2008). His current research includes a study of the ways aristocratic readers in late medieval England used books as a source of solace and as a tool to shape their identities and, with musicologist Richard Rastall, a history of English minstrels. Taylor received his PhD from the University of Toronto.