Shaw Worth

Thesis title: Forms of Courtliness in England, France, and Burgundy, 1450–1525

Supervisors: Professors Jane Griffiths (English) and Helen Swift (French)

Research interests: medieval courtly arts c. 1400–1550 (poetry, tapestry, pageant, chronicle); historical poetics and prosody, especially lyric theory; medieval courtly literatures of England and France; history of the book, especially manuscript illumination and early woodcuts; form and formalisms; English and Gallo-Romance philology to 1500 (including Occitan); literature and the visual arts, especially the development of naturalism.

Doctoral research: My research examines the artistic and intellectual manifestations of the sociocultural framework we call courtliness in the kingdoms of England and France as well as the duchy of Burgundy in the long fifteenth century, c. 1400–1550, broadly construed. I contend that this unloved period in both English and French-language writing — that of the Francophone grands rhétoriqueurs, and of English writers at the courts of Edward IV, Henry VII, and Henry VIII to the Reformation — can and should be reframed as an early crucible of thought on aesthetic form. Crucially, it cannot emerge as such through the paradigm of author study alone. My research consequently attempts to think of 'form' in broader terms, whether intellectual-theoretical (as in Stephen Hawes's and Georges Chastelain's use of 'rhetoric' in the Pastime of Pleasure and Douze dames de rhétorique), material (in tapestry, bibliography and manuscript fragment), or prosodic (in the use of verse forms and elisions between them). Ultimately, the project aims to probe the terms of analytical inquiry into medieval writing and art based on what is a richer archive than has often been remarked.

Writers of interest include those behind the arts de seconde rhétorique, Stephen Hawes, Georges Chastelain, Alexander Barclay, Michault Taillevent, John Skelton, and the English reception and translation of Charles d'Orléans, Alain Chartier, and Christine de Pizan; I am also interested in a large variety of anonymous contemporary texts (The Receyt of the Ladie Kateryne; The Court of Sapience, among others). More broadly, I am interested in the French lyrico-narrative tradition from the thirteenth century onwards.

In Michaelmas and Hilary 2025/6, I am co-convening (with Rebecca Menmuir) a reading group on Lydgate’s verse translation of Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de la vie humaine; very slowly, I am producing a working text of the fifteenth-century Middle French apocalyptic treatise in Bodleian Library, MS Douce 134.

Background: I took my BA in English from Magdalen College, Oxford (2021–4), where I remained for the interdisciplinary MSt in Medieval Studies (2024–5) working between French and art history, supported by a Senior Mackinnon Scholarship. After receiving an Anne Hudson Scholarship at Lady Margaret Hall, in 2025 I was elected to an Examination Fellowship at All Souls College.

Publications: 'Reading Metrical Ambiguity in John Skelton's A Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell', The Explicator, 83 (3), 2025, 231–9.