Gillian Lesley "Jill" Mann, FBA (born 7 April 1943), [1] is a scholar known for her work on medieval literature, especially on Middle English and Medieval Latin.
Gillian Lesley "Jill" Mann, FBA (born 7 April 1943), [1] is a scholar known for her work on medieval literature, especially on Middle English and Medieval Latin.
Mann was born in York, where her father was engaged in war work, but brought up in Sunderland, Co. Durham, where she was educated at the Bede Grammar School for Girls. In 1961 she won a place at St Anne's College, Oxford, and took her BA (1st Class Hons) in English Language and Literature in 1964. She began research work on the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales in Oxford, but in 1967 she moved to Cambridge and eventually transferred to a Cambridge PhD, which she completed in 1971. She held a Research Fellowship at Clare Hall, Cambridge, from 1968 to 1971; from 1971 to 1972 she taught medieval and some modern literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury. In 1972 she returned to Cambridge as an Official Fellow of Girton College, and in 1974 she was appointed to an Assistant Lectureship in the Faculty of English, upgraded to Lecturer in 1978. In 1988 she was elected Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English (Cambridge), a post which she held until 1998. She was Chair of the Faculty of English from 1993 to 1995, and helped the Faculty prepare for its first ever HEFCE teaching quality assessment. In 1998 she resigned the Cambridge Chair and took up a post as Notre Dame Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana; on taking early retirement in 2004, she was made an Emeritus Professor of Notre Dame. [2] She is resident in Cambridge, and is a Life Fellow of Girton College. [3]
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Mann's work has always had a strongly comparative character, bringing together texts in several medieval languages. Her dominant interests are the literature of fourteenth-century England, especially Chaucer, and medieval beast literature in Latin, French, and English. Her books include Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (1973), Feminizing Chaucer (2002), and The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer (edited with Piero Boitani); she also edited the Canterbury Tales for Penguin Classics (2005). She produced an edition and translation of the Latin beast epic Ysengrimus, with a lengthy account of the poem's relation to its historical context in twelfth-century Flanders; she is currently working on an edition and translation of the Speculum Stultorum, another twelfth-century Latin beast epic, written by a monk of Christ Church, Canterbury. She has published some 60 articles on medieval literature in English, Latin, French, and Italian; fifteen of them are collected in Life in Words: Essays on Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet, and Malory, edited with a lengthy Introduction by Mark David Rasmussen analysing their contribution to medieval literary studies. Excerpts from her published work are frequently included in Norton Critical Editions and similar anthologies.
A full bibliography up to 2011 is published in Mann's festschrift, Medieval Latin and Middle English Literature, ed. Christopher Cannon and Maura Nolan (Cambridge, 2011)
Geoffrey Chaucer was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for The Canterbury Tales. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He was the first writer to be buried in what has since come to be called Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey. Chaucer also gained fame as a philosopher and astronomer, composing the scientific A Treatise on the Astrolabe for his 10-year-old son Lewis. He maintained a career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and member of parliament.
John Gower was an English poet, a contemporary of William Langland and the Pearl Poet, and a personal friend of Geoffrey Chaucer. He is remembered primarily for three major works—the Mirour de l'Omme, Vox Clamantis, and Confessio Amantis—three long poems written in French, Latin, and English respectively, which are united by common moral and political themes.
"The Knight's Tale" is the first tale from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.
Nigel de Longchamps, also known as Nigel Wireker,, Neel de Longchamps, or Nigel of Canterbury, was an Anglo-Norman satirist and poet of the late twelfth century, writing in Latin. He is known to have been a monk of Christ Church, Canterbury, from 1186 to 1193, and perhaps earlier.
Troilus and Criseyde is an epic poem by Geoffrey Chaucer which re-tells in Middle English the tragic story of the lovers Troilus and Criseyde set against a backdrop of war during the siege of Troy. It was written in rime royale and probably completed during the mid-1380s. Many Chaucer scholars regard it as the poet's finest work. As a finished long poem, it is more self-contained than the better known but ultimately unfinished The Canterbury Tales. This poem is often considered the source of the phrase: "all good things must come to an end" (3.615).
The Green Knight is a heroic character of Arthurian legend, originating in the 14th-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the related medieval work The Greene Knight. His true name is revealed to be Bertilak de Hautdesert in Sir Gawain, while The Greene Knight names him "Bredbeddle". The Green Knight later features as one of Arthur's greatest champions in the fragmentary ballad "King Arthur and King Cornwall", again with the name "Bredbeddle".
Tail rhyme is a family of stanzaic verse forms used in poetry in French and especially English during and since the Middle Ages, and probably derived from models in medieval Latin versification.
Elizabeth Helen Cooper,, known as Helen Cooper, is a British literary scholar. From 2004 to 2014, she was Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge.
"The Marriage of Sir Gawain" is an English Arthurian ballad, collected as Child Ballad 31. Found in the Percy Folio, it is a fragmented account of the story of Sir Gawain and the loathly lady, which has been preserved in fuller form in the medieval poem The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle. The loathly lady episode itself dates at least back to Geoffrey Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale" from The Canterbury Tales. Unlike most of the Child Ballads, but like the Arthurian "King Arthur and King Cornwall" and "The Boy and the Mantle", "The Marriage of Sir Gawain" is not a folk ballad but a song for professional minstrels.
The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle is a 15th-century English poem, one of several versions of the "loathly lady" story popular during the Middle Ages. An earlier version of the story appears as "The Wyfe of Bayths Tale" in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, and the later ballad "The Marriage of Sir Gawain" is essentially a retelling, though its relationship to the medieval poem is uncertain. The author's name is not known, but similarities to Le Morte d'Arthur have led to the suggestion that the poem may have been written by Sir Thomas Malory.
Derek Stanley Brewer was a Welsh medieval scholar, author and publisher.
Piero Boitani is an Italian literary critic.
Sir Eglamour of Artois is a Middle English verse romance that was written sometime around 1350. It is a narrative poem of about 1300 lines, a tail-rhyme romance that was quite popular in its day, judging from the number of copies that have survived – four manuscripts from the 15th century or earlier and a manuscript and five printed editions from the 16th century. The poem tells a story that is constructed from a large number of elements found in other medieval romances. Modern scholarly opinion has been critical of it because of this, describing it as unimaginative and of poor quality. Medieval romance as a genre, however, concerns the reworking of "the archetypal images of romance" and if this poem is viewed from a 15th-century perspective as well as from a modern standpoint –
Sir Perceval of Galles is a Middle English Arthurian verse romance whose protagonist, Sir Perceval (Percival), first appeared in medieval literature in Chrétien de Troyes' final poem, the 12th-century Old French Conte del Graal, well over one hundred years before the composition of this work. Sir Perceval of Galles was probably written in the northeast Midlands of England in the early 14th century, and tells a markedly different story to either Chretien's tale or to Robert de Boron's early 13th-century Perceval. Found in only a single manuscript, and told with a comic liveliness, it omits any mention of a graal or a Grail.
Jan Ziolkowski occupies the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professorship of Medieval Latin at Harvard University. From 2007 to 2020 he served as Director of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. His scholarship has focused on the literature, especially in Latin, of the Middle Ages.
The rash promise is a common motif in medieval and folk literature, especially fairy tales. It was also termed a blind promise or rash boon. It is classified in the Motif-Index of Folk-Literature as motif M223 and likely has an Oriental origin.
Sebastian Sobecki is a medievalist specialising in English literature, history, and manuscript studies.
Norman Francis Blake was a British academic and scholar specialising in Middle English and Early Modern English language and literature on which he published abundantly during his career.
Christopher Cannon is a medievalist at Johns Hopkins University. He is currently Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of English and Classics, previously Chair of Classics, and from 2020-2024 Vice Dean for the Humanities and Social Sciences in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. His research and writings have focused on the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, early Middle English, and elementary learning in the Middle Ages.
Marion Turner is the J R R Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language at the University of Oxford and an academic authority on Geoffrey Chaucer. She has authored several books, including Chaucer: A European Life, which was shortlisted in 2020 for the Wolfson History Prize, and was a finalist in the PROSE Awards, and for which she was awarded the 2020 Rose Mary Crawshay Prize.
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