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Medieval Studies

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Royal Holloway maintains a particularly strong team of scholars working on the Middle Ages, across the departments of English, History, French, Italian, Drama, and Music. In the English Department, we specialise in Old English poetry, Piers Plowman, and Arthurian Literature. We contribute to the interdisciplinary MA in Medieval Studies| and welcome applications for PhD research in our areas of expertise.

Staff

Dr Alistair Bennett (Lecturer in Medieval Literature):
Piers Plowman, medieval homilies, religious literature
Dr Ruth Kennedy (Reader in Medieval Literature):
Alliterative revival, metrics, medieval drama
Dr Catherine Nall (Lecturer in Medieval Literature):
Arthurian literature, manuscripts, early print, military culture
Dr Jennifer Neville (Reader in Anglo-Saxon Literature)
Old English poetry, especially the Exeter Book riddles

Notable Publications

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R. Kennedy, 'New Theories of Constraint in the Metricality of the Strong-Stress Long Line, Applied to the English Rhymed Alliterative Corpus, c1400', in Métriques du Moyen Âge et de la Renaissance, ed. par Dominique Billy, postface de Marc Domincy (Paris: l'Harmattan, 1999), pp. 131-44.
R. Kennedy, 'Strong-Stress Metre in Fourteen-Line Stanza Forms', in Medieval English Measures: Studies in Metre and Versification, ed. by Ruth Kennedy, Parergon Special Issue (NS 18:1), July 2002, pp. 127-55.
R. Kennedy, Three Alliterative Saints’ Hymns, Early English Text Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
C. Nall, ‘Perceptions of Financial Mismanagement and the English Reaction to Defeat in the Hundred Years War’ in Linda Clark (ed.), The Fifteenth Century VII (Boydell and Brewer, 2007), pp. 119-135.
C. Nall, ‘William Worcester Reads Alain Chartier: Le Quadrilogue Invectif and its English Readers’ in E.J. Cayley and Ashby Kinch (eds.), Chartier in Europe (Gallica Series, D.S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 135-148
C. Nall, ‘Ricardus Franciscus writes for William Worcester’, Journal of the Early Book Society 11 (2008): 207-216
C. Nall, ‘Malory’s Morte Darthur and the Rhetoric of War’, Medium Aevum (2010): 207-224
J. Neville, Representations of the Natural World in Old English Poetry, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 27 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
J. Neville, ‘Fostering the Cuckoo: Exeter Book Riddle 9’, Review of English Studies, 58 (2007), 431-46.
J. Neville, ‘Hrothgar’s Horses: Feral or Thoroughbred?’, Anglo-Saxon England, 35 (2006), 131-57
J. Neville, 'Making their Own Sweet Time: The Scribes of Anglo-Saxon Chronicle A', in The Medieval Chronicle: Proceedings of the 2nd International Congress on the Medieval Chronicle, ed. by Erik Kooper (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 166-77
J. Neville, 'The Unexpected Treasures of the Implement Trope: Hierarchical Relationships in the Old English Riddles', Review of English Studies, 62 (256) (2011), 505-19 [doi: 10.1093/res/hgq131]

Current Postgraduate Research Students

Click here to see details of our current postgraduate research students in Medieval Studies|

Recent Postgraduate Research Students

Amanda Moss, 'Westminster School Ms 23: A study' (R. Field, C. Barron)
Pirkko Koppinen, '"Swa þa Stafas Becnaþ: Ciphers of the Heroic Idiom in the Exeter Book Riddles, Beowulf, Judith, and Andreas’ (J. Neville)
Hannah Batson, 'The Natural World in Medieval Literature' (R. Field)
Una O'Farrell Tate, 'The Return of Arthur in 20th Century Literature' (R. Field)
Melanie Heyworth, 'Moral Regulation and Gendered Morality in Anglo-Saxon England' (on exchange from Sydney, Australia) (J. Neville)
Jane Page, 'Protean Patterns of Wisdom in Old and Early Middle English Literature' (J. Neville)
Alison Truelove, 'An Edition of the Stonor Letters and Papers' (R. Kennedy)