Completed Research Projects

Discover below some of the exciting research projects completed by current and past staff at the English Medieval Studies department.

Relations of Power: Women's Networks in the Middle Ages.

Irina Dumitrescu, Dr Emma O. Bérat, and Dr Rebecca Hardie (eds).

Bonn University Press, 2021.

This book is an output of the 'Macht und Herrschaft' research initiative. For more on Prof. Dumitrescu's involvement in the 'Macht und Herrschaft' initiative, see section below.

Women’s networks – their relations with other women, men, objects and place – were a source of power in various European and neighbouring regions throughout the Middle Ages. This interdisciplinary volume considers how women’s networks, and particularly women’s direct and indirect relationships to other women, constituted and shaped power from roughly 300 to 1700 AD. The essays in this collection juxtapose scholarship from the fields of archaeology, art history, literature, history and religious studies, drawing on a wide variety of source types. Their aim is to highlight not only the importance of networks in understanding medieval women’s power but also the different ways these networks are represented in medieval sources and can be approached today. This volume reveals how women’s networks were widespread and instrumental in shaping political, familial and spiritual legacies.

Reviews

“Relations of Power is short but its span is immense, moving from circa 300 CE through to the Tudors, with a foray into seventeenth-century Spain… The contributors to this collection of eight intricate, hard-won essays draw out several figures from the silt of forgetting. However, while redressing the injustice of history, they are also setting out to define afresh the modes and forms of power that medieval women used by listening to the stories objects tell, auscultating the evidence of jewels, images, liturgical arrangements, and architectural plans.” – Marina Warner, The New York Review of Books

“Das Buch überzeugt vor allem durch seinen interdisziplinären Zuschnitt, der sowohl unterschiedliche historische Sachverhalte als auch unterschiedliche Zugriffsweisen in den jeweiligen Disziplinen konzise präsentiert. Die unterschiedlichen und zahlreichen sozialen Rollen von Frauen in (ihren) Netzwerken, ihre Beziehungen zu Menschen und Objekten werden in allen Beiträgen des Bandes durchgehend anschaulich und präzise dargestellt, so dass die Beiträgerinnen und Herausgeberinnen einen Band zusammengebracht haben, der trotz und wegen methodischer Freiheiten gleichzeitig ein Panorama von Möglichkeiten und ein gelungenes Ganzes darstellt.” – Anne Diekjobst, H-Soz-Kult

Want to read more? Click here.

Power, Networks, and Transgression in England and France, 600-1500

This project considers how literary and other narrative sources from England and France between 700 and 1500 ascribe qualities of power and domination to elite women.

It theorizes forms of charisma that are transgressive because they counteract masculine power structures or incorporate seemingly “negative” qualities. The study explores how elite networks and assemblages (of people, texts, objects) assist the construction of feminine charisma.

This is a project under the initiative of Power and Domination: Bonn Center for Premodern Orders and their forms of communication. For more information, see here.

The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature

Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Irina Dumitrescu.

Anglo-Saxons valued education yet understood how precarious it could be, alternately bolstered and undermined by fear, desire, and memory. They praised their teachers in official writing, but composed and translated scenes of instruction that revealed the emotional and cognitive complexity of learning. Irina Dumitrescu explores how early medieval writers used fictional representations of education to explore the relationship between teacher and student. These texts hint at the challenges of teaching and learning: curiosity, pride, forgetfulness, inattention, and despair. Still, these difficulties are understood to be part of the dynamic process of pedagogy, not simply a sign of its failure. The book demonstrates the enduring concern of Anglo-Saxon authors with learning throughout Old English and Latin poems, hagiographies, histories, and schoolbooks.

Interested? Read more here.

Reviews

'The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature does full justice to the Anglo-Saxon interest in pedagogy and the complexity of their attitudes to it. It is also beautifully written, peppered with deft turns of phrase … Dumitrescu has produced a hugely enjoyable, informative, and thought-provoking monograph, which will be of interest to all scholars of early medieval literature.'

Susan Irvine, Source: Speculum

'Through its patient and generous attention to the literature of early medieval England, [this book] allows the emotional world of literate Anglo-Saxons to live again in its complexity and richness, and demonstrates how much can be evoked even from seemingly resistant works like grammars and translations. Elegant and stylish as well as learned, it is a lovely exemplar of genuinely humanistic scholarship.'

Emily Thornbury, Source: Anglia

'Dumitrescu’s readings are meticulous and thought-provoking.'

Hana Videen, Source: The Times Literary Supplement

(Blurb and reviews from Cambridge University Press website)

The Experience of Education in Anlgo-Saxon Literature_book cover.JPG

Everyday Arts: Craft, Voice, Performance. Special Issue of Medieval Feminist Forum 57.1 (2021)

Edited by Irina Dumitrescu and Emma O. Bérat.

How do crafts, manual production, bodily acts, and vocal and physical performances that have traditionally been gendered female create space for creative expression and public authority? How do these practices of making intersect with the exercise of textual or political authority?

This special issue of Medieval Feminist Forum spans from considerations of local, specific agency that is achieved through craft or performances to larger assertions of political authority through female-coded bodies. The essays treat the relationship between textile production, feminine labor, and violence; the social and communal work achieved through women’s performance and speech in late medieval drama and literature; the role of women’s arts in shaping geographical and political landscapes; and the modern art of reconstructing medieval women.

Interested? Click here to read the volume.

Geschlect Macht Herrschaft – Interdisziplinäre Studien Zu Vormoderner Macht Und Herrschaft.

Göttingen: V&R Unipress, Bonn University Press, 2021.

Irina Dumitrescu, Andrea Stieldorf, Linda Dohmen, AND Ludwig Morenz (Eds).

The category of ‘gender’ is essential in the context of macht and herrschaft. This volume focuses on the interaction or even complementarity of ‘male’ and ‘female’ herrschaft or the share in rule of men and women. The biological gender categories ‘man’ and ‘woman’ and the connected social and cultural roles do not serve as opposing, dichotomic notions or concepts but rather as a category for analysis, without which macht and herrschaft can not be examined appropriately. The contributions highlight Latin-European regions, yet they include regions from China to Egypt from 3rd B.C until 16th century A.D. Written texts, graphics and the material culture will be analysed.

The Shapes of Early English Poetry: Style, Form, History.

Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2019.

Irina Dumitrescu and Eric Weiskott (eds).

This volume contributes to the study of early English poetics. In these essays, several related approaches and fields of study radiate outward from poetics, including stylistics, literary history, word studies, gender studies, metrics, and textual criticism. By combining and redirecting these traditional scholarly methods, as well as exploring newer ones such as object-oriented ontology and sound studies, these essays demonstrate how poetry responds to its intellectual, literary, and material contexts.

The contributors propose to connect the small (syllables, words, and phrases) to the large (histories, emotions, faiths, secrets). In doing so, they attempt to work magic on the texts they consider: turning an ordinary word into something strange and new, or demonstrating texture, difference, and horizontality where previous eyes had perceived only smoothness, sameness, and verticality.

Click here to find out more.

Reviews

“The Shapes of Early English Poetry offers a robust study of early English aesthetics. The contributors engage this challenging topic with verve and relevance, ever attentive to the social and historical implications of style.” – Stacy Klein, Anglia

“This consistently astute and innovative set of essays is dedicated to Roberta Frank by former students and others who intersected with her during her “Yale years,”… The essays here cultivate more explicit and varied theoretical apparatuses than Frank’s own historically learned, often witty, and always deftly suggestive essays on “style” and poetics; the volume’s showcasing of methods is one of its most useful features. On offer are metrics, lexical generativity, performativity, phenomenology, sound studies, and “object-oriented ontology” (OOO), all deployed with high self-consciousness and acuity and applied to medieval English poetry from The Wanderer to Lydgate’s Fifteen Joys and Sorrows of Mary, with additional forays into the feminist provocations of Meghan Purvis’s 2013 translation of Beowulf, and an OOO approach to Old Norse kennings.” – Andrew Galloway, Modern Philology

The Poems of Walter Kennedy

Nicole Meier.

Boydell and Brewer, 2008.

First modern edition of the complete works of Walter Kennedy, the late medieval Scottish poet.

Walter Kennedy is best known as William Dunbar's feisty opponent in their celebrated Flyting, but his poetic talents, praised by such famous near-contemporaries as Gavin Douglas and David Lyndsay, extend far beyond this, ranging from short bawdy lyric to sustained devotional meditation. This first complete edition of all his surviving poetry offers parallel-text versions of all the textual witnesses for each poem, a full set of textual and explanatory notes, a substantial glossary, and appendices. An extensive introduction provides biographical information, and sets the text in its cultural and intellectual context. The book is thus both an invitation to Kennedy's poetry -the only extant medieval poetry from the west of Scotland - and a tribute to a significant poetic voice of the late middle ages.