Shaw Worth
Thesis title: Forms of Courtliness in England, France, and Burgundy, 1450–1525
Supervisors: Professors Jane Griffiths (English) and Helen Swift (French)
Research interests: medieval courtly arts c. 1400–1550 (poetry, tapestry, pageant, chronicle); historical poetics and prosody, especially lyric theory; medieval courtly literatures of England and France; history of the book across manuscript and print, especially text-image relations; form and formalisms; English and Gallo-Romance philology to 1500 (including Occitan); literature and the visual arts, especially the development of naturalism.
Doctoral research: My research examines secular aesthetics developed and exchanged at the courts of England, France, and Burgundy, roughly between the Wars of the Roses and the English Reformation (or the accession of Louis XI to the death of Margaret of Austria). Principally, I work on French- and English-language poetry, whose affordances and procedures of representation I suggest became a subject of debate and active thought in this period. It cannot emerge as such, however, through the paradigm of author study alone. My research consequently attempts to think of aesthetics and artistic form in broader terms, whether intellectual-theoretical (as in Stephen Hawes's and Georges Chastelain's use of 'rhetoric' in the Pastime of Pleasure and Douze dames de rhétorique), material (in tapestry, bibliography and manuscript fragment), or prosodic (in the use of verse forms and elisions between them). Ultimately, the project aims to probe the terms of analytical inquiry into medieval writing and art based on what is a richer archive than has often been remarked.
Writers of interest include those behind the arts de seconde rhétorique, Stephen Hawes, Alexander Barclay, and John Skelton; English reception and translation of Alain Chartier, Christine de Pizan, and Charles d'Orléans; and the rhétoriqueurs themselves, especially Jean Lemaire de Belges, André de la Vigne, and Jean Bouchet. More broadly, I am interested in the French lyrico-narrative tradition from the thirteenth century onwards.
I have convened (with Rebecca Menmuir) a reading group on Lydgate’s verse translation of Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de la vie humaine; in December 2026, with Jacob Ridley, I am hosting a two-day conference on the 550th anniversary of the establishment of William Caxton's press at Westminster.
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. After receiving an Anne Hudson Scholarship at Lady Margaret Hall, in 2025 I was elected to an Examination Fellowship at All Souls College.
Publications:
'The Generic Fallacy: John Lydgate and John Shirley Against ‘Drama’ in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.20', Review of English Studies (2026), advance access at doi.org/10.1093/res/hgag060.
'Reading Metrical Ambiguity in John Skelton's A Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell', The Explicator, 83 (3), 2025, 231–9.
Reviews:
Lucie Kaempfer, The Joy of Love in the Middle Ages, Review of English Studies 77/330 (2026), 388-90, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgag025.
Talks and invited presentations:
'Dame Rhetoric's primers: Rhetoric and Middle English literary form, c. 1470-1510', 36th International Conference of SELIM, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 23-5 September 2026.
(with Jacob Ridley) 'Rescuing Caxton from the Printers', The Print Revolution Then and Now, part of the Printing Historical Society's one-day event at Senate House for the exhibition The English Print Revolution: Caxton and Beyond, University of London, 29 May 2026.
'A portrait of the poem as a young man: procedures of representation in fifteenth-century English lyric form', 34th International Conference of SELIM, Universidad de Granada, 18-20 September 2024.
