Professor Julia Boffey, MA (Cambridge) DPhil (York)
Professor of Medieval Studies
email: j.boffey@qmul.ac.ukPhone: +44 (0)20 7882 8531
Research interests:
• Chaucer and the Chaucerian tradition
• Manuscript and book production, 1350-1550
• Late medieval and early C16 verse in England and Scotland, especially lyrics
• Anglo-French exchange in the late Middle Ages
Julia's research has involved varieties of verse and prose writing c.1350-1550, and is especially concerned with matters of transmission and reception. She has edited a collection of Fifteenth-Century English Dream Visions (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2003), co-authored A New Index of Middle English Verse (British Library: London, 2005), and published articles on Middle English lyrics, on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century verse and verse translation, 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 is on the Council of the Early English Text Society. She is on the steering committee of the Harlaxton Symposium, and with Virginia Davis co-organized the 2005 symposium whose proceedings were published as Recording Medieval Lives (Shaun Tyas: Donington, 2009). During 2011 she held a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship to support the completion of a book about the relationships between manuscript and printed books in London c. 1475-1530.
PhD students supervised by Julia have worked on Chaucer and post-Chaucerian writing, on late medieval manuscript anthologies and textual production in London, and on medieval lives and their documentation and representation. She welcomes proposals on any topics relating to the research interests outlined above.
Publications:
Books:
(with Virginia Davis), ed., Recording Medieval Lives: Proceedings of the 2005 Harlaxton Symposium, Harlaxton Medieval Studies, 17 (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2009)
(with A. S. G. Edwards) , A New Index of Middle English Verse (London: British Library, 2005)
Fifteenth-Century English Dream Visions: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)
Selected Articles:
‘London books and London readers, c. 1475-1550’, for Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, edited by Brian Cummings and James Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 420-37
‘Manuscript and print: authors, books and readers’, for A Companion to Medieval Poetry, ed. Corinne Saunders (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2010), pp. 538-54
‘Scattered Lyrics in BL MS Addit. 18752’, for English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700, 16 (2010, published 2011), 30-47
‘London, British Library Add. MS 18752: a Tudor Hybrid Book’, English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700, 15 (2009), 41-64
‘The Middle English Tree of Love: Writing English Verse in a French French of England c. 1100-c.1500, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (York Medieval Press in association with The Boydell Press: Woodbridge, 2009), pp. 386-96
‘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), pp. 63-74
‘From Manuscript to Modern Text’, for A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, c. 1350-1500, ed. Peter Brown (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 107-22
‘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 & 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
‘John Mychell and the Printing of Lydgate in the 1530s', Huntington Library Quarterly, 67:2 (2004), pp. 251-59
‘The Charter of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost and its Role in Manuscript Anthologies', Yearbook of English Studies, 33 (2003), 120-30