Dr Mary Flannery, MPhil and PhD (Cambridge)
Lecturer
Tel.: +44 20 7882 8536
Research interests:
- Medieval English literature and culture; rumour and reputation
Mary Flannery is a scholar of medieval literature and cultural history, with a particular focus on the role of reputation in literature and culture, and the relationship between literature and the public in late-medieval England (c. 1350-1550). Her first book, John Lydgate and the Poetics of Fame (to be published by Boydell & Brewer), identifies the subject of fame as key to understanding the poetics of fifteenth-century England’s most important author, arguing that Lydgate conceived of the poet as someone in a unique position to aid his patrons not only by responding to the political pressures of fame, but by generating good fame for his employers and, ultimately, for himself.
Currently, Mary is researching the subject of shame in the medieval imagination. Other research interests include manuscript culture and the history of the book. In 2009 she co-curated an exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles entitled ‘Temptation and Salvation: The Psalms of King David’.
Mary’s other scholarly activity includes a series of interdisciplinary workshops on inquisition and confession in medieval England, organized in collaboration with scholars in the United Kingdom, Europe, and North America. Funded by the QMUL School of English and Drama and the Westfield Trust, these workshops have culminated in a collection of essays which she is co-editing with Katie Walter of the University of Bochum, entitled Imagining Inquisition in Medieval England, 1215-1550.
Publications:
Selected articles and chapters:
‘A Bloody Shame: Chaucer’s Honourable Women’, The Review of English Studies (2010), doi: 10.1093/res/hgq098.
‘The Shame of the Rose: A Paradox’, in Guilt and Shame: Essays in French Literature, Cinema, and Thought, ed. by Jennifer Chamarette and Jennifer Higgins (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 51-69.
‘Brunhilde on Trial: Fama and Lydgatean Poetics’, The Chaucer Review, vol. 42, no. 2 (2007), 139-160.
Selected reviews:
‘David Matthews, ed, In Strange Countries: Middle English literature and its afterlife’, Times Literary Supplement, 18 March 2011, 25.
‘Katharine Breen, Imagining an English Reading Public, 1150-1400’, Times Literary Supplement, 4 March 2011, 26-7.
‘Jane Bliss, Naming and Namelessness in Medieval Romance’, Arthuriana, vol. 19, no. 3 (2009), 1-2.
‘Alexandra Cuffel, Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic’, Medium Aevum, vol. 77, no. 2 (2008), 344-5.
‘Nigel Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes: Narrative Tragedy in Its Literary and Political Contexts’, Notes and Queries, New Series, vol. 53, no. 2 (June 2006), 219-220.