This post is really just the story of how one thing leads to another in research.  It’s also to tell you about what I’ve been working on in the last three weeks, a sudden and unexpected digression from my poetics book.  It’s also to highlight the role of noblewomen in the commissioning of English verse in the middle of the fifteenth century.

Over New Year’s, I went to the British Library to look at a fifteenth-century manuscript with a little-known prologue to a little-known text.  The text, the Liber Proverbiorum, is a verse translation of an early fourteenth-century collection of proverbs and wise sayings by the friar and preacher Nicole Bozon.  The text as a whole had been edited in two American PhD dissertations, but these were hard to get hold of, so I went to look at it myself. Continue reading Fit for a Queen →