Robinson, Dr Olivia

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College: Brasenose College
Period/ Subject: Medieval
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Research Interests:

My research interests fall principally in the field of literary translation from French into English, and more generally in Anglo-Continental literary relationships, in the late Middle Ages.  My current project focuses on the fifteenth-century French writer Alain Chartier, his appearance in manuscript and, particularly, in print.   I am investigating the raft of early printed copies of his works which appeared in northern Europe (principally France, the Low Countries and England) during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. I pay particular attention to the ways in which individual Chartier texts were presented and marketed by their earliest printers, the appearance of these texts in contemporary sammelbände of vernacular printed material, Chartier’s inclusion in the earliest printed verse anthologies to be produced in France, and the parallel emergence of single-author ‘collected Chartier’ volumes.  My next research project will focus upon medieval Biblical drama, and will investigate the production contexts, layout, scribal presentation and reception of manuscript and printed play-scripts in England and on the Continent.  Particular areas of interest will include the scripts and performance records of enclosed female monastic communities, scripts commissioned and performed for bespoke secular patrons, intertextual use of the liturgy within play scripts, dramatisation of apocryphal narratives, and the marketing, reception and consumption of printed play scripts as private, devotional ‘reading’ texts.  

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