Medieval and Early Modern Studies
Early period studies are integral to the English Department, with eight of our forty-three continuing faculty members actively engaged in teaching and researching literature and culture before 1700. We approach these periods through a diverse range of methodologies and areas of expertise.
Teaching In addition to graduate courses, Special Topics courses (239, 387), and advanced undergraduate courses (500-level), we regularly offer five full undergraduate courses in medieval and early modern literature:
These core courses on key writers and texts are presented through interdisciplinary approaches such as those offered by post-colonial theory, rhetorical theory, performance studies, socio-historical studies, textual studies, feminist theory, natural history and museum studies, queer theory, and gender studies. Our courses use innovative methods such as studies abroad and intensive work with the University's Special Collections, including the Osborne Collection of rare books and manuscripts. A number of our undergraduate students have continued on to graduate studies in recent years. A list of the titles of recent honours theses and graduate theses appears below.
| Research Our research expertise is wide-ranging. We have published or are completing research in areas as diverse as manuscript and textual studies, the history of women's access to literary culture, Renaissance garden design, governmental arts, gender and sexuality, museum studies and the history of science, and humanist pedagogy. We explore how literature interfaces with the histories of reading and rhetoric, of print and manuscript culture, of religious writing and practices, of performance, of modernization and adaptation, and of economics and property relations. Our scholarly editions--of texts from medieval poetry to seventeenth-century biographies--take both traditional (print) and hypertextual forms. We have received SSHRC funding (Standard Research Grants) to research subjects from vernacular books and women readers in late medieval England (Jacqueline Jenkins); seventeenth-century manuscripts and English drama (Mary Polito); and an edition of the only known manuscript of four Middle English poems (Murray McGillivray). MARCS We forge many of our research connections and collaborations through regular meetings of The Medieval and Renaissance Cultural Studies (MARCS) research group. The Osborne Project A team of researchers led by Mary Polito, with co-investigators Susan Bennett and Jacqueline Jenkins, and a number of graduate students are studying a newly discovered anonymous, seventeenth-century play manuscript held by the University of Calgary Special Collections, in the Osborne collection of rare books and manuscripts. The theatrical and social context of this comic play ("The Humorous Magistrate") and its relation to an earlier version of the same play held at Arbury Hall, Warwickshire are the subject of a broad interdisciplinary investigation. Drs. Polito and Jenkins are preparing an edition of the Osborne manuscript for the Malone Society, and with the support of a record-sized SSHRC grant are researching the manuscript. For more information see The Osborne Project web site. |
Graduate Theses
- An Edition of the Middle English Poem Cleanness and an Analysis of its Writing System (Ph.D.)
- The Rhetoric of Objects in Early Modern Culture (Ph.D.)
- Lady Mary Wroth and Figurations of Race (M.A.)
- Incest and Class in Jacobean Revenge Tragedy (M.A.)
- "Nobler Bread, Needful Blood": Eucharistic Tropes in the Sacred Poetry of Richard Crashaw (M.A.)
- Pedagogical Mythology: Attanasio's Arthur as Contemporary Hero (M.A.)
- Prostitution, Humanism and the Renaissance Stage (M.A.)
- Dating Osborne MsC132.27 (M.A.)
- 'my spowse most specyally': Late Medieval Mystical Unions and the Morality Play Wisdom (M.A.)
- A shorte treatyse of contemplacy on: The Book of Margery Kempe in Early Print Culture (M.A.)
- Representation of Continental Mysticism in BL MS Additional 37790: Mystical Union's Relationship with Courtly Love (M.A.)
- Power, Politics and the Written Word: Caesarius of Heisterbach's vita of Engelbert I of Cologne (d. 1225) (M.A.)
- Images of Parental Nurturing in Middle English Conduct Books and Contemplative Writing (M.A.)
- The Mythical Duality of Shakespeare's Tragic Women: Myths and Manipulations (Ph.D.)
- Robert Greene's Menaphon: Revealing the Rhetoric of Romantic Pastoral Prose Fiction (Ph.D.)
- Shakespeare's Richard Plays: The Rhetoric of Power and the Power of Rhetoric (Ph.D.)
Honours Theses
- The Middle English Pearl: an Electronic Edition
- Mearc-stapa, Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell: Liminality in Theme and Composition in Beowulf
- The Dream of the Rood: an Electronic Edition
- A Gift of Bones (a poem based on the Caedmon story)
- The Language of Praise in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- Monsters and Heroism in Beowulf
- In women is founden a gentilnesse: Medieval Romance, Hagiography, and the Opportunity for Subversion in the Representation of Women
- Under the Fote of a Woman: The Life of St Margaret of Antioch as Proto-Feminist Discourse
- Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls: Orthodox Vernacular Writer or Dangerously Powerful Heretic?
- Vernacularity and Textual Constructions of Women's Spirituality in Late Medieval England
- Delectable Poetry: The Pedagogical Nature of Spenser's The Faerie Queene
- Chaste Boundaries: Transgressing Chastity Within the Walls of The Faerie Queene
- 'In Mirrours More than One': Fashioning and Figuring Elizabeth I in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene
- The Community Building Function of the Literary and Modern Epic: A Comparative Reading of Book III of The Faerie Queene and Buffy the Vampire Slayer
- 'Thy registers and thee I both defy': Shakespeare and the Play of Justice and History
- The Islamic Presence in William Shakespeare's Othello
- The Food of Memory: Shakespeare's use of Balladry (Winner of Literary Kaleidoscope Critical Writing Award)
- Theology in the sonnets and sermons of John Donne
- Metatheatre as Pedagogy: Early Modern Teaching Practices On and Off the Stage
- Shakespeare's Sonnets and Sexual Ethics
- 'Princely Paws': Hands, Gesture and Tyranny in Titus Andronicus
- The Distance to Here: Defining 'Nation' against Frenchness in William Shakespeare's Henriads
- Man enough for a Woman: Economics and the Trope of the Cross-dressed Heroine in The Roaring Girl and Three Shakespearean Comedies
- Sweet Revenge: Carnival Consumption and the Comedic in Renaissance Revenge Tragedy
- Is Nothing Sacred?: Timeliness and Timelessness in Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet
- A Historical Reading of the Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford
- Biblical Revisionism in Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum
- The Ladie's Chastity in Milton's Comus
