Bose, Dr Mishtooni

Job Title: Christopher Tower Official Student and Tutor in Medieval Poetry in English and CUF Lecturer
College: Christ Church
Period/ Subject: Medieval

Email address: mishtooni.bose@chch.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests:

Years after J.A. Burrow’s prescient lectures on Thinking in Poetry (1993), it has become clear just how apposite the cognitive turn is for the study of medieval intellectuality. In developing current critical interests in the possible synergies between mental functions and literary forms, we are following in the footsteps of medieval pioneers to whom it was natural to think about, to model, and to experiment with, such connections. Langland, Chaucer, Christine de Pizan and Reginald Pecock were just some of the figures engaged in this enterprise. I will shortly compete an essay on ‘Vernacular Opinions’, developed from a paper given at a recent conference on Uncertain Knowledge in the Middle Ages, which I co-organised together with Nicolette Zeeman, Kantik Ghosh, Dallas Denery and Rita Copeland. Discussing the work of Pecock and Christine de Pizan, I argue that in each case the category and topic of Opinion provides us with a portal through which to view the different ways in which these writers represented, and sought to instigate, the reformation of the mind. Medieval writers were clearly aware, avant la lettre, of the neuroplastic possibilities of the mind that changes on re-reading and re-writing, becoming a hospitable site for the reconfiguration of previously-held associations between objects, arguments and affect. It reveals itself most obviously in allegory, but re-reading and re-writings, reconsiderations, of reformist positions are also represented in, and evoked by, less easily categorised kinds of narrative process. In the monograph I develop these ideas further by examining the thinking mind as a central object and target of late-medieval reformist discourse, as modelled in writings as diverse as Piers Plowman and Pecock’s Book of Faith. I am also hoping to collaborate with Sif Ríkharðsdóttir and David Lawton on a parallel project entitled Voice and Emotion in Medieval Literature (grant application pending).

Teaching Areas:

English literature, 600-1509, with particular expertise in late-medieval poetry; the English Language.

Recent Publications:

‘The Opponents of John Wyclif’, in A Companion to John Wyclif, ed. Ian Levy (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 407-455
‘Religious Authority and Dissent’, in A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, ed. Peter Brown (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 40-55
‘Jean Gerson, Poet’, in Poetry, Knowledge and Community in Late Medieval France, eds. Rebecca Dixon and Finn E. Sinclair with Adrian Armstrong, Sylvia Huot and Sarah Kay (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 56-68

Other Information:

Selected forthcoming publications

‘Complaint, Prophecy and Pastoral Care in the Fifteenth Century: Thomas Gascoigne’s Liber Veritatum’, in Cate Gunn and Catherine Innes-Parker eds., The Literature of Pastoral Care and Devotion in Medieval England:  Essays in Honour of Bella Millett (Boydell/York Medieval Press)
‘Advena, Peregrinus: Jean Gerson’s charisma’, in Charisma and Religious Authority: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Preaching 1200-1500, eds. Katherine L. Jansen and Miri Rubin (Brepols)
‘Thomas Gascoigne’s Autobiographies’, in Writing Lives in Fifteenth-Century England. Harlaxton Medieval Studies XVI: Proceedings of the 2005 Symposium, eds. Julia Boffey and Virginia Davis
‘Useless mouths: the poetics of reform from Audelay to Skelton’, in Form and Reform: Reading the Fifteenth Century, eds. Kathleen Tonry and Shannon Gayk
‘Writing, Heresy and the Anticlerical Muse’, in Elaine Treharne and Greg Walker eds., The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature
Wycliffite Controversies, eds. Mishtooni Bose and Patrick Hornbeck (Brepols)

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