Dr Jenni Nuttall was an academic who taught and researched medieval literature at the University of Oxford for twenty years, and who had a lot of practice at making old words interesting. She had a DPhil from Oxford and completed the University of East Anglia’s MA in Creative Writing. She was the author of a readers’ guide to Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde with Cambridge University Press. Mother Tongue was her book first for the general reader. She died in 2024.