MS Digby 86 and Thirteenth-Century Scribal Poetics
Dr Jenni Nuttall
Lecturer in English, Exeter College
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 e-book translations of James I of Scotland's Kingis Quair, Robert 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
Publications
-
-
Sir Orfeo and Robert Henryson's Orpheus and Eurydice: Modern English Prose Translations
2019|Internet publication<a href=""></a> -
Patronage
2019|Chapter|A New Companion to ChaucerThis chapter outlines and illustrates various models of author–patron relationships in late medieval literary culture. It explores why Chaucer may have avoided establishing patronage relationships despite his close connections to the royal court, discussing in particular the ambivalent and perplexing representation of encounters with patrons in the Book of the Duchess and the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women. It ends by considering what consequences Chaucer's avoidance of patronage had for the forms of his literary works.Literary Criticism -
‘many a lay and many a thing’: Chaucer’s Technical Terms
2018|Chapter|Chaucer and the Subversion of FormThis 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|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.
More
