Misty Schieberle
- Professor
- Director of Undergraduate Studies
Contact Info
Personal Links
Biography —
What I love most about medieval studies is the opportunity to study language history, to investigate handwritten manuscripts, and to analyze the complex, vibrant ways that Middle English authors draw on a variety of Latin and French sources. There is nothing more exhilarating than sitting in a rare book archive like KU's Spencer Research Library poring over a medieval manuscript to analyze its carefully scrawled text, its unique contents and beautiful illustrations, and the marginal comments that preserve evidence of how the texts were read hundreds of years ago. My current research explores English translations and adaptations of popular French literary texts, giving attention to issues of gender, politics, educational strategies, and neglected individual manuscripts. Recent courses have included gender in premodern literature, adaptations of medieval stories into modern literary texts and fantasy novels, Arthurian literature, and “skin” as a theoretical construct that interconnects topics such as race, gender, martyrdom, and medicine.
My scholarship illustrates my commitment to studying gender, manuscripts, and the relationship of French and English literary culture in the later Middle Ages. My first book – Feminized Counsel and the Literature of Advice in England, 1350-1500 – analyzes Middle English political literature that represents women as wise, beneficial counselors to kings. In particular, I investigate the ways that, rather than define masculine authority against women, male poets develop their authority as writers of advice alongside such women characters, and in the ways that these positive depictions of women challenge the dominant misogynist tradition that depicted women as inferior and powerless.
I have also published a critical edition of two English translations of Christine de Pizan's Epistre Othea. This volume is the product of almost a decade of research on various manuscripts and early printed editions of the Othea, which included discovering a neglected sister-manuscript for the Lytle Bibell of Knyghthod, analyzing Stephen Scrope’s mode of translating French, and identifying the British Library, Harley 219 manuscript of the Othea as copied by the famous fifteenth-century poet Thomas Hoccleve. I am also completing an edition and scholarly analysis of the French, Latin, and English glossary Hoccleve compiled in Harley 219.
My current book project revises English literary history to establish Christine de Pizan as a major influence on fifteenth-century English literary culture. Although most authors vocally place themselves in the masculine English lineage of “father” Chaucer, my analysis of texts and manuscripts demonstrates that Hoccleve, Lydgate, and other writers drew far more on Christine’s works than has yet been recognized.
Education —
Research —
14th- and 15th-century English literature; gender and political literature; Christine de Pizan and French literature in England; manuscript studies; and translation studies.
Selected Publications —
Works in Progress
Christine de Pizan and Fifteenth-Century English Literary History (book, co-authored with Sebastian Sobecki and Elizaveta Strakhov, contracted with Cambridge University Press).
Hoccleve’s Trilingual Glossary: A Critical Edition from London, British Library, Harley Manuscript 219. Accepted, Medium Aevum Monograph Series.
Books
Christine de Pizan’s Advice for Princes in Middle English Translation: Stephen Scrope’s Epistle of Othea and the Anonymous Lytle Bibell of Knyghthod (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Press, 2020). (critical edition)
Feminized Counsel and the Literature of Advice in England, 1350-1500 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2014). (monograph)
Edited Collections
Approaches to Teaching Hoccleve, ed. and introd. with Elon Lang, special issue of Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching (accepted, anticipated Fall 2024).
Manuscripts, Readers and Texts: Essays in Honour of Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, ed. and introd., with assistance of Amanda Bohne (York Medieval Press, 2024).
Articles and Chapters
“Teaching Hoccleve’s Letter of Cupid and Gender Debate,” accepted, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching.
“Recognizing the Clerical Proletariat: Evidence from Late Medieval London Wills,” in Manuscripts, Readers and Texts: Essays in Honor of Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (York Medieval Press, 2024).
“New Source Evidence for Robert Wyer’s .C. Hystoryes of Troye,” Journal of the Early Book Society 26 (2023): 93-132.
“Thomas Hoccleve of London: New Evidence of Hoccleve’s Family and Finances,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 45 (2023): 287-311. https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2023.a913918
“Gower’s Aristotelian Legacy: Reading Responsibility in the Confessio Amantis and Lytle Bibell of Knyghthod” in Negotiating Boundaries in Medieval Literature and Culture: Essays on Language, Difference, and Reading Practices in Honor of Thomas Hahn, ed. Kara McShane and Valerie Johnson (DeGruyter, 2022), 305-22.
“A New Hoccleve Literary Manuscript: The Trilingual Miscellany in London, British Library, MS Harley 219.” Review of English Studies 70 (2019): 799-822. https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgz042
“The Lytle Bibell of Knyghthod, Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea, and the Problem with Authorial Manuscripts.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 118 (2019): 100-28. https://doi.org/10.5406/jenglgermphil.118.1.0100
“Rethinking Gender and Language in Stephen Scrope’s Epistle of Othea,” Journal of the Early Book Society 21 (2018): 97-121, 322.
"Proverbial Fools and Rival Wisdom: Lydgate's Order of Fools and Marcolf." The Chaucer Review 49.2 (2014): 204-27.
“Barnyard Pedagogy: An Approach to Teaching Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale.’ Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 20 (2013): 19-40.
"Controlling the Uncontrollable: Love and Fortune in Book I of the Confessio Amantis." ES: Revista de Filología Inglesa, Special Issue: Gower in Context(s). Scribal, Linguistic, Literary and Socio-historical Readings, 33.1 (2012): 75-89.
“‘Thing which a Man Mai Noght Areche’: Women and Counsel in Gower’s Confessio Amantis.” The Chaucer Review 42.1 (2007): 91-109.
Awards & Honors —
- Frances L. Stiefel Teaching Professor, Department of English (2024-)
- University Scholarly Achievement Award for Humanities Research, University of Kansas, 2022
- National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2021-2022, for “Patriarchy, Politics, and Christine de Pizan’s Influence on English Literature, 1400-1478” (monograph in progress)
- Hall Center for the Humanities, Mid-Career Research Fellowship, KU, 2019-2020
- Hall Center Faculty Colloquium: Comparative Literature in the Age of Deglobalization, Fall 2018.
- Shirley Cundiff Haines and Jordan L. Haines Faculty Research Fellowship in English, University of Kansas, Spring 2018.
- Hall Center for the Humanities, Humanities Research Fellowship, University of Kansas, Fall 2016.
- Humanities General Research Fund Award, University of Kansas, 2014, 2015, 2019.
- Conger-Gabel Teaching Professor, 2013-2016
- American Association of University Women American Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, 2012-2013
- International Travel Funds for Humanities Research, KU Office of International Programs, 2012
- Mabel S. Fry Graduate Teaching Award, 2012
- Finalist for the H.O.P.E. (Honor for Outstanding Progressive Educator) Award, Senior Class of 2010