The Manuscripts of The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye and John Fortescue’s The Governance of England (All Souls College, Oxford, Visiting Fellowship)

This project, which resulted in a monograph and multiple articles, was supported through a generous three-month Visiting Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford.

The project involved on two interconnected projects: two chapters on manuscripts of The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye and John Fortescue’s The Governance of England for a new monograph.

During my time in Oxford I examined three manuscripts of the Libelle (All Souls MS 103 and Bodleian MSS Laud 704 as well as Rawlinson poetry 32) and five of Fortescue’s Governance of England (Bodleian MSS Laud Miscellaneous 593, Digby 145 and 198, and Rawlinson B. 384 as well as D. 69). My work concentrates on studying the physical context of all eight manuscripts, in addition to working on annotations, scribal features, and the transmission and reception history of these witnesses. I paid particular attention to the first-recension manuscripts of the Libelle (All Souls MS 103 and Bodleian MS Laud 704) and to MS Laud Miscellaneous 593, traditionally considered the preferred manuscript for Fortescue’s Governance of England.

This project is linked to my third monograph, Last Words: The Public Self and the Social Author in Late Medieval England (Oxford University Press, 2019).

This project
- reassesses late medieval English literature
- includes new archival breakthroughs: new life records, authorial attributions, and handwriting identification
- presents a new theory of medieval authorship
- reveals how John Gower kept the Trentham manuscript in his final years, how John Lydgate wished to be remembered, and why Thomas Hoccleve wrote his best-known work, the Series