Julia Boffey, MA (Cambridge) DPhil (York)

Professor of Medieval Studies
Tel: +44 (0)20 7882 8531
email: j.boffey@qmul.ac.uk

Research interests

Middle English and sixteenth-century texts and their transmission

Julia Boffey's research involves writings of all kinds in English c 1350-1550, especially their transmission and reception. She has edited a collection of Fifteenth-Century English Dream Visions (Oxford University Press, 2003), co-produced A New Index of Middle English Verse (British Library, 2005), and published articles on Middle English lyrics, on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century poetry, on women’s literacy and reading in the Middle Ages, and on early printing in England. Julia is co-organizer (with Miri Rubin) of a QM seminar series on ‘Medieval and Early Modern Texts and Contexts', and has been one of the officers of The Early Book Society since its formation in 1987. She is on the steering committee of the Harlaxton Symposium (for which she organized the 2005 symposium on ‘Recording Lives in England in the Later Middle Ages'). She is at present working on the relationships between manuscript and printed books in London c 1475-1550.

Recent publications (since 2001)

Books

Fifteenth-century English Dream Visions: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)

A New Index of Middle English Verse ( London: British Library, 2005) (with A S G Edwards)

Selected articles

‘Prospecting in the Archives: Middle English Verse in Record Repositories', New Directions in Later Medieval Manuscript Studies: Essays from the 1998 Harvard Conference, ed Derek Pearsall ( Woodbridge: York Medieval Press/Boydell and Brewer, 2000), pp 41-51

'"Many grete myraclys . . . in divers contreys of the eest": The Reading and Circulation of the Middle English Prose Three Kings of Cologne', in Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain: Essays for Felicity Riddy, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), pp 35-47

'"Twenty thousand more": Some Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Responses to The Legend of Good Women', Middle English Poetry: Texts and Traditions. Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall from the 8th York Manuscripts Conference , ed. Alastair Minnis (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press/Boydell and Brewer, 2001), pp 279-97

'"Forto compleyne she had gret desire": the Grievances of Fifteenth-Century Dream Visions', Nation, Court and Culture: New Essays on Fifteenth-Century English Poetry , ed Helen Cooney (Dublin : Four Courts Press, 2001), pp 116-28

'The Charter of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost and its Role in Manuscript Anthologies', Yearbook of English Studies, 33 (2003), 120-30

'Conflations of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost and the Charter of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost in Manuscript and Print', for The Medieval Book and a Modern Collector: Essays in Honour of Toshiyuki Takamiya , ed T Matsuda, J Scahill, and R Linenthal (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2004)

'John Mychell and the Printing of Lydgate in the 1530s', Huntington Library Quarterly, 67:2 (2004), pp 251-59

'Chaucer's 'Fortune' in the 1530s: some sixteenth-century recycling', Studies in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Texts in Honour of John Scattergood: 'The Key of All Good Remembrance', ed A Fletcher and A-M D'Arcy (Four Courts Press: Dublin, 2005), pp 53-64

'Middle English Lyrics and Manuscripts', for A Companion to the Middle English Lyric, ed Thomas Duncan (Boydell and Brewer, Woodbridge: 2005), pp 1-18

'Troilus and Criseyde and Chaucer’s Shorter Poems: Codicology and Palaeography', for Approaches to Teaching Chaucer’s 'Troilus and Criseyde' and the Shorter Poems, ed Tison Pugh and Angela Weisl (New York: MLA, 2007)

'From Manuscript to Modern Reader', for A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, c 1350-1500, ed Peter Brown (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006)

'The Kingis Quair and the poems of Bodleian Library MS Arch Selden B 24', in A Companion to Early Scottish Poetry, ed Priscilla Bawcutt and Janet Hadley-Williams (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2006

Top