About
I am a medievalist focusing on texts in Latin and Old French in the 12th and 13th centuries. My primary research interests revolve around the encounter between Latin (academic, scholastic, university) learned discourses on one hand, and vernacular romance and other poetic production on the other -- that is, literature produced in Old French and Latin by clerks accustomed to thinking through the Latinate culture that formed their education. I am also interested in medieval allegory as a form of thought experiment, the develoment of vernacular authorship and medieval theories of cognition and individuality.
My dissertation is centred on 12th-century translations of literary traditions inherited from antiquity, in particular four romances that engage with the stories of Troy, Eneas, Thebes, and Alexander. I consider how these translators mapped out various taxonomies of transmission, creating spaces for different readers and materials, as a way of mediating access to Latin culture for a non-specialist public. In other words, how they they operated within pre-existing social and literary power structures as authorities on knowledge, and how their texts, in turn, defined what was crucial to know about antiquity for their audiences.
