Dr Lucy Brookes

I read and work on the secular literature written in England during the high to late Middle Ages. I completed my BA at Worcester College, Oxford, before specialising in Medieval Literatures and Languages during my Masters at the University of York. I then returned to Worcester and Oxford for my DPhil in English.

My first book, Convention and the Individual in Medieval English Romance (under contract with Boydell & Brewer) is a study of character and subjectivity. There I argue that by reading romance for its conventions, new readings of much-neglected texts emerge. 
 
Alongside the preparation of my first book, I am beginning to think about several new projects. The first of these is a study of veracity and ‘truthfulness’ in Middle English literature. In an article published in New Medieval Literatures, I used the modern coinage ‘truthiness’ to interrogate the tendency for romances (obviously and indeed self-consciously fictional texts) to claim to be telling the truth at moments when they are most sensational and extraordinary. I think that there are compelling parallels to be drawn between the semantic slipperiness of ‘trouthe’ in the later Middle Ages, and our own ‘Post-Truth’ era; this project will start with romance, but build out to encompass other popular ‘fictional’ genres of the period.   
  
I am also working on several smaller articles that use recent work in the History of Emotions to read romance. Other research interests include Arthurian literature (medieval and modern), late medieval drama, ballads, TV soap operas and Westerns, and narratology.