Michael Lysander Angerer
Supervisor: Professor Laura Ashe
Research Interests: Translation theory, multilingualism and multilingual manuscripts, medieval historiography, national identity, narrative theory, Arthurian romance, verse poetics
I am a literary historian and translation theorist, and I work on the medieval literatures of Northwestern Europe. I am particularly interested in setting medieval English literature in its European context, to see how multilingual interactions and translation processes shape vernacular texts and manuscripts. My approach is fundamentally comparative – accordingly, I work across Old and Middle English, Latin, Old French, Old Norse, Old Saxon, Old Frisian, Old and Middle Dutch and Middle High German. My work, ranging from early medieval epics to Arthurian history and romance, has appeared in journals including the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Exemplaria, Saga-Book, and New Medieval Literatures. For my first article on Old English and Old Saxon biblical epics, I was awarded the 2023 Paul E. Szarmach Article Prize.
My doctoral research, supervised by Laura Ashe, re-evaluates the importance of poetic form as a way of shaping ‘national’ identities in a multilingual context – and what happens to these identities when poetic forms are translated. Specifically, I investigate how the translation of poetry shapes the construction of English identity in the multilingual history-writing of medieval England. Since poetry is deeply dependent on the features of one particular language, it can easily be cast as ‘untranslatable’ and become emblematic of one particular language and culture. This is visible in the different forms of verse inserted in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and in the ways in which they are (not) translated in the Latin translations of the Chronicle. But the Anglo-Norman and early Middle English verse chronicles of Geffrei Gaimar, Wace, and Laȝamon take a different stance. They use innovative verse forms to accommodate increasingly complex multilingual and multi-ethnic identities in the wake of the Norman Conquest. In the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, verse translation thus becomes a way of signalling the continuity of English history and identity across multiple languages and forms.
Having grown up in Austria, I came to the UK to read for a BA in English and French at Oriel College, as part of which I spent a year abroad at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. I then took up the Jeremy Griffiths Memorial Studentship at St Hilda’s College to complete an MSt in English (650–1550). My DPhil at Corpus Christi College is funded by the E. K. Chambers Studentship.
In 2023–24, I am teaching Prelims Paper 2 (Early Medieval Literature, 650–1350) at Worcester College.
Peer-Reviewed Publications
— ‘Hebban olla vogala: An Eleventh-Century Link Between Dutch and English Literary History’, Neophilologus (forthcoming 2024) [advance open access]
— ‘Arthurian Worldbuilding around the Round Table: Wace’s History, Chrétien’s Fictions, and Continental Romance’, New Medieval Literatures, 24 (2024), 32–59
— ‘Gaimar's Estoire des Engleis, Line 6460: What Gaimar Did With the Books of the Welsh’, Notes and Queries, 71.1 (2024), 11–13 [open access]
— ‘Domesticating Prophecy in Verse: The Translation Strategy and Politics of Merlínusspá’, Saga-Book, 47 (2023), 5–26
— ‘Translatio Studii as Literary Innovation: Marie de France’s Fresne and the Cultural Authority of Translation’, Exemplaria, 34.4 (2022), 341–62 [open access]
— ‘Beyond “Germanic” and “Christian” Monoliths: Revisiting Old English and Old Saxon Biblical Epics’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 120.1 (2021), 73–92 [open access]
