I think it was when my English degree took me to France that I knew I was doing something right. Just before New Year’s, I was standing in the fourteenth-century papal palace in Avignon, staring at the largest extant collection of painted medieval floor tiles. Around two hundred miniature glazed peafowl and fish stared back. At some point during the expansion of the Grande Audience (the enormous hall where he would receive legates, canon suits, and petitions), it would seem that Clement VI, or a particularly visually minded member of his curia, thought that the floor in the anteroom behind the hall ought to match the floor-to-ceiling allegorical mural. (Hence the birds.) Two thoughts emerged in concert, both traceable to two and a half years of an English BA: ‘the vac essay is solved; and the pope and the wall have a poem in them.’
That kind of creative-critical encounter, the weird—in this case avian—way in which the two can dovetail, is characteristic for me not only of Western medieval culture, but also of my own experience of studying in the English Faculty. Thanks to its relatively limited temporal span, pursuing Course II threw me from my second year into a much broader set of critical methodologies than was ever possible at school: palaeography, textual criticism, comparative literature, experimental interdisciplinarity across human disciplines. The remoteness of the content of medieval writing is always bound to the immediacy of seeing a human hand trace it out in manuscript, in that manner in which the strangeness of medieval animals (in encyclopaedic bestiaries, satirical romance, and allegory) were so often voices of their observers’ most inevitably individual neuroses. Thus I was in Languedoc with the sense that pursuing Old Occitan research was not a supplement or counterpoint to my research in English, but a part of it; similarly, I have come to see writing poetry in response to that research. The poem from that room, which was incredibly lucky to win the Newdigate Prize this year, is as much about seeing light on paint as it is about reading allegory. I’m grateful to have been encouraged both to write it, and to know that parsing a right answer is unlikely to yield results.
Heading into 2024/5, when I’ll return to Oxford for the MSt in Medieval Studies administered by the Humanities Division at large, I’m struck by the extent to which those strands I picked up in English will still be integral to my work. My research proposes a reevaluation of the individuation of late medieval Anglo-French secular verse forms through the lens of the contemporary visual arts. In that comparison I am seeking to recover instances of experimental, exploratory writing and painting, though they can often be concealed by their age. I am as fascinated by the plasticity of medieval artistic form now as when I learned Old English verse was unlineated in my first week, and by attempting to practise those forms myself, I have attempted to deepen and extend my critical capacity to read and hear them. Whenever a nervous prospective applicant asks me why there’s so much medieval emphasis on the syllabus at an open day it’s that experimentalism that I champion, and also what I try to bring to workshops I’ve had the joy of facilitating at the community-led, all-volunteer Oxford Poetry Library.
I remember a stage while applying for university when my personal statement was more or less finished, but I was floundering for a final punchline. Caught in an acutely teenage, deeply misplaced shame about revealing a growing love for fifteenth-century Chauceriana, I wanted to attest a degree of personhood beyond the classroom; I had virtually no extracurriculars, and had exhausted my set of half-baked close readings. Then an aphorism from an open day at the Faculty came back to me: ‘this degree is for people who like writing. A lot.’ I hope, I wrote, to continue writing at university. I have at Oxford, with the wonderful help of every outstanding tutor I’ve encountered both at Magdalen College (Simon Horobin, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Rafa Pascual, Tom Revell, and Hannah Ryley) and in the Faculty (Jane Griffiths, Jack Colley, Annika Ester Maresia, and all too briefly, Jenni Nuttall).
Shaw Worth has just graduated from a BA in English at Oxford (Magdalen College) and will be starting a MSt in Medieval Studies in Michaelmas Term.
