Shaw Worth
Thesis title: Lyric likenesses: Retracing courtly form in the English fifteenth century
Supervisors: Professors Jane Griffiths (English) and Helen Swift (French)
Research interests: historical poetics and prosody, especially lyric theory; medieval courtly literatures of England and France; history of the book, especially manuscript illumination and text-critical method; medieval 'autography' and written selves; English and Gallo-Romance philology to 1500 (including Occitan); literature and the visual arts, especially the development of naturalism.
Doctoral research: My research examines the history, technique, and transmission of English- and French-language courtly verse between c. 1380–1500 in England, France, and Burgundy. My project, 'Lyric likenesses', attempts to discern a distinctively fifteenth-century aesthetic paradigm that prompted the new use of courtly lyric as a vehicle for producing written and illuminated selves, even — indeed especially — if they remain deliberately occluded or historically anonymous. I locate these changes in a range of phenomena that expand the parameters circumscribing our understandings of late medieval poetic form: manuscript attestation, for instance, might become a practice of naturalism as much as single-subject portraiture (as with some anthologies of John Lydgate's short lyrics); prosodic variation between stanzas might begin to produce a voice (as in Charles d'Orléans' English lyrics). In so doing, I also aim to redress the bibliographic narrative that love-lyric was only sparsely composed and idiosyncratically transmitted in England in the period. Rather, its traces and textuality are unavoidable and were exploited across text-types and genres; nor, moreover, are those surviving English lyrics weak imitations of Continental vernacular counterparts.
Authors of particular interest include Lydgate, Charles, Christine de Pizan, Alain Chartier/Richard Roos, Michault Taillevent, Thomas Hoccleve, and (pseudo-)Chauceriana; more broadly, I am interested in the French lyrico-narrative tradition from the thirteenth century onwards.
In Michaelmas and Hilary 2025/6, I am co-convening (with Rebecca Menmuir) a reading group on Lydgate’s verse translation of Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de la vie humaine.
Background: I took my BA in English from Magdalen College, Oxford (2021–4), where I remained for the interdisciplinary MSt in Medieval Studies (2024–5) working between French and art history, supported by a Senior Mackinnon Scholarship. My DPhil research is made possible by an Anne Hudson Scholarship, generously funded between Lady Margaret Hall and the English Faculty.
Publications: 'Reading Metrical Ambiguity in John Skelton's A Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell', The Explicator, 83 (3), 2025, 231–9.
