Professional Statement
I work on late medieval English literature, with a special focus on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the vexed relationship between the “medieval” and the “Renaissance.” I am especially interested in defining and articulating the role of the aesthetic in late medieval vernacular literature, particularly in relation to variable cultural understandings of sensation and cognition. I am currently working on two projects. The first focuses on the place of contingency and sensation in the work of John Gower, while the second addresses notions of the beautiful and the sublime in medieval literature as they relate to an emerging notion of literary style.
Maura Nolan received her A.B. from Dartmouth College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Duke University. Before coming to Berkeley in 2005, she taught at the University of Notre Dame.
Specialties
Books
| Title | Fields | |
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John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture During the fifteenth century John Lydgate was the most famous poet in England, filling commissions for the court, the aristocracy, and the guilds. He wrote for an elite London readership that was historically very small, but that saw itself as dominating the cultural life of the nation. Thus the new literary forms and modes developed by Lydgate and his contemporaries helped shape the developmen.... |
Selected Publications and Papers Delivered
John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
The Text in the Community: Essays on Medieval Works, Manuscripts, Authors and Readers. Edited with Jill Mann. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006.
Master Narratives of the Middle Ages. Guest Editor for a special issue of the Journal of English and Germanic Philology. Introduction by Maura Nolan. Volume 106.2 (April, 2007).
“The Fortunes of Piers Plowman and its Readers.” Yearbook of Langland Studies 20 (2007 for 2006): 1-41.
“Lydgate’s Worst Poem.” In Lydgate Matters, ed. Andrea Denny-Brown and Lisa Cooper (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2007), 71-87.
“Beauty.” Twenty-First Century Approaches: Medieval, ed. Paul Strohm. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, pages 207-221.
“Lydgate’s Literary History: Chaucer, Gower, and Canacee.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 27 (2005).
“The Performance of the Literary: Lydgate’s Mummings.” In John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture and Lancastrian England, ed. Larry Scanlon and James Simpson. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005.
“Now wo, now gladnesse”: Ovidianism in the Fall of Princes.” ELH 71.3 (Fall, 2004): 531-58.
“Making the Aesthetic Turn: Adorno, the Medieval, and the Future of the Past.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34.3 (Fall, 2004): 549-75.
“Metaphoric History: Narrative and New Science in the Work of F. W. Maitland.” PMLA 78.1 (May, 2003): 557-72.
“The Art of History Writing: Lydgate’s Serpent of Division.” Speculum 78 (January, 2003): 99-127.
“‘Acquiteth yow now': Textual Contradiction and Legal Discourse in the Man of Law's Introduction.” In The Letter of the Law, ed. Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 136-53.
“‘With tresone withinn’: Wynnere and Wastoure, Chivalric Self-Representation, and the Law.” In the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 26.1 (January, 1996): 1-28.
Recent English Courses Taught
Fall, 2013
| 250/2 | Research Seminar: Sensory Aesthetics in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Poetry and Drama |
Graduate Courses |
Spring, 2012
| 180E/1 | The Epic |
Renaissance and Early Modern World Literature Poetry |
Fall, 2011
| 45A/2 | Literature in English: Through Milton |
Introductory Surveys |