About the lecture

In this module, we think at the physical description of the Wife of Bath that Chaucer gives us in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. In particular, we ask: to what extent is the Wife of Bath presented as a comedic figure through her embodiment in the General Prologue? Are we encouraged to perceive her embodiment as funny, and do we?

About the lecturer

Anna joined Keble College, Oxford in 2010 as the College Lecturer in Old and Middle English. She teaches Moderations Paper 3 (Old English), Final Honour Schools Paper 3 (Middle English) and Final Honour Schools Paper 1 (The English Language), as well as medieval special topics and authors.

Before coming to Keble, she was a Non-Stipendiary Lecturer at St Anne’s and Merton Colleges from 2008-2010. She also worked on the Oxford University Computing Services’ Woruldhord Project, an online resource for students and teachers of Old English, from July-October 2010 (http://projects.oucs.ox.ac.uk/woruldhord/). She completed her Masters at Christ Church in 2006, and her DPhil in 2010. She took her undergraduate degrees, which were in English and Law, at the University of Melbourne in 2005.

Anna's work is primarily concerned with the depiction of masculinity, violence and conflict in the late Middle Ages. Her doctoral research focused specifically on the representation of knighthood and chivalry in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Scotland, and she is now working to extend this research into a more wide-ranging comparative study of conflict and conflict-resolution in late medieval and early modern Scotland and England. She has also published shorter articles on the Scottish Alexander and Arthurian traditions, the politics of translation in Gavin Douglas’ 1513 translation of the Aeneid and gender and sexuality in Malory’s Morte Arthur.

She also possesses a strong research interest in Digital Humanities, and particularly in the potential for online editions to make manuscript and print witnesses more widely available to students and researchers.