Dr Jenni Nuttall

Jennifer Nuttall
Fellow by Special Election in English, St Edmund Hall
jennifer.nuttall@ell.ox.ac.uk

My research spans literature from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries written both in Middle English and Middle Scots, centring on how poets and their audiences understood the formal and linguistic licences of poetry. I am also interested in multilingualism and translation, particularly how poetic forms, techniques, terminology and diction cross what at first glance might seem to be boundaries of language or nation.

No Middle English or Middle Scots poet wrote an art of poetry (i.e. a treatise describing the forms and versification of poetry in English and Scots), yet some of this poetry is among the most formally complex in the English language. The book which I am currently completing, Middle English and Middle Scots Poetics, imagines what such an art of poetry might have said, if one had been written. My research reconstructs the full surviving lexicon of pre-Renaissance technical terms for poetry, as well as exploring how this terminology coevolves with the technical terms of Latin and French poetics.  This book also rediscovers this poetry’s technē in moments of conspicuous formal experiment and elaboration. Verse-form is explored as a technology in action in chapters on medieval verse-drama and on poems which switch from one verse-form to another mid-text.

I blog about my research at www.stylisticienne.com, where you can find a work-in-progress glossary of Middle English/Scots poetic terms.  

I'm also writing a chapter on 'Literary Language' for the Fifteenth Century volume of the Oxford History of Poetry in English, edited by Julia Boffey and A S G Edwards.

I translate medieval poetry into Modern English in my spare time, and have recently published an e-book translation of James I of Scotland's Kingis Quair. I'm currently working on translations of Henryson's Orpheus and Eurydice and the Middle English romance Sir Orfeo.

I tweet about my research and teaching on Twitter – you can follow me @Stylisticienne

In 2012 I published a reader’s guide to Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (the set commentary text for Finals) with Cambridge University Press.  I am particularly interested in helping students learn how to close-read Middle English poetry and have created a ‘Poetics Primer’ for undergraduates and school pupils on my website.  In 2015 I was awarded a Teaching Excellence Award by the University of Oxford for my contribution to the teaching of Troilus and Criseyde commentary.

I am a member of the Editorial Board of The English Review, Philip Allan's magazine (published by Hodder Education) for sixth-formers studying English Literature at A-level.

Early Medieval Literature (Old English and Early Middle English Literature)

English Literature from 1350 to 1550 (Late Medieval and Early Tudor Literature)

The English Language

College Website

Publications

  • Digby 86 and Thirteenth-Century Scribal Poetics

    Chapter
    |
    Manuscript Digby 86: Devotion, Science, and Literary Diversions for a Worcestershire Household, c. 1280

  • The English Roundel, Charles’s Jubilee and Mimetic Form

    Chapter
    |
    Charles d’Orléans’s English Aesthetic: The Form, Poetics, and Style of “Fortunes Stabilnes”

  • ‘many a lay and many a thing’: Chaucer’s Technical Terms

    Chapter
    |
    Chaucer and the Subversion of Form
    This chapter investigates Chaucer’s usage of technical terminology to refer to verse-form and poetic technique. Chaucer uses the technical terms or jargon of poetry not just to name his own techniques or the techniques of others but also to pose questions to himself and to his readers. Chaucerian formal self-reference appears as purposeful muddling or inconclusive duplication of technical terms (by using two or more terms instead of one, by using technical terms idiosyncratically, or by creating dissonance between a poem’s form and the label applied to it), creating a game of knowledge and expectation between Chaucer and his audience. Such self-reference exposes some of Chaucer’s own attitude to poetic form, to technical virtuosity and to the capacity of English to imitate or surpass the forms of its classical and continental predecessors and rivals.
    Chaucer; poetics; form; terminology; technique; verse form; rhyme scheme; lyric; ambivalence

  • Lydgate and the Lenvoy

    2018
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    Journal article
    |
    Exemplaria
    © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This article charts the development of the lenvoy (or envoy) in English courtly verse in the fifteenth century, looking in particular at the poetry of Hoccleve and Lydgate. It first offers a brief account of the lenvoy’s formation. Then, drawing on recent theorizations of poetry’s self-authorizing form, it argues that these authors use changed, elaborated or upgraded form to emphasize poetry’s ability to legitimate itself. It explores the role this legitimating form plays in establishing the relationship of poet and poem to patron and audience. In Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, the lenvoy moves from a work’s periphery to become a key structural element of this advice text. A concluding section traces the lenvoy’s influence as a site for self-theorization on later Lancastrian and early Tudor authors.

  • James I of Scotland: ‘The Kingis Quair’: A Translation into Modern English Prose

    2017
    |
    Other
    James I’s The Kingis Quair is a hidden gem of medieval poetry, written in 1424 by a Scottish king held prisoner in England from the age of eleven until almost thirty years old. The poem narrates his capture and imprisonment, and how he fell in love one beautiful spring morning with an English noblewoman, Joan Beaufort. In a dream vision, we find out what King James learned about good and bad fortune from the goddess Minerva and from Fortune herself, and how he discovered the nature of true love. The poem was influenced by Chaucer’s dream visions, but also has its own whimsical charms. This ebook offers an accurate yet very readable prose translation of The Kingis Quair. This version of the poem in contemporary English is designed for students and for readers wishing to explore fifteenth-century poetry who might find the original Middle Scots language difficult to understand. This translation is presented stanza-by-stanza so it can be easily read alongside the original text.
    • More
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