Misty Schieberle

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.