Misty Schieberle

What I enjoy most about medieval studies is the opportunities to study history, to investigate handwritten manuscripts, and to analyze the complex, vibrant ways that late medieval authors reinvent a variety of Latin, French, and English sources. I love taking students into KU's Spencer Research Library to investigate medieval manuscripts and early books that allow us to analyze carefully scrawled texts, unique contents, and marginal comments that preserve evidence of how the texts were read hundreds of years ago. 

My teaching is animated by consideration of literary history and ways later authors continue to draw on and reimagine previous textual traditions. Recent courses have included British literature survey, introduction to medieval literature, adaptations of medieval stories into modern literary texts and fantasy novels, the literature of King Arthur, and a research seminar that approached “skin” as a theoretical construct to interconnect a range of topics from book history to identity, penance, and medicine. I have also co-edited with Elon Lang a special issue on “Approaches to Teaching Thomas Hoccleve” for Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching (2024).

On the whole, my research explores English translations and adaptations of popular French literary texts, giving attention to issues of identity, politics, educational strategies, and neglected individual manuscripts and archival sources. My first book investigated how Middle English political literature offers positive depictions of advisors from outside the expected arenas of power to challenge the dominant tradition in which religious and university texts were the primary sources for political advice. Almost a decade of research on various manuscripts and early printed editions of Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea [Letter of Othea] yielded a critical edition of two English translations (Medieval Institute Press, 2020), and several articles about the translation, reception, and manuscript traditions of the Othea.

My recent research has focused on archival evidence that resulted in my identification that the British Library, Harley 219 manuscript of the Epistre Othea was personally copied by the famous fifteenth-century poet Thomas Hoccleve and identifications of previously unknown historical life records for medieval poets Thomas Hoccleve and Thomas Usk. My research into medieval wills and deeds also appears in my article in an edited volume in honor of Kathryn Kerby-Fulton.  

My current book project revises English literary history to establish Christine de Pizan as a major influence, alongside Chaucer, on the most important figures in fifteenth-century English literary culture.