Rowan Wilson

Thesis title: Hearts of Stone: Failures of Feeling in Medieval Devotional Culture 1200-1500

Supervisor: Annie Sutherland

Research interests: the history of emotions; aberrant affects; queerness and transness in pre-modernity; medieval surrogacy and kinship; 'horror' and the medieval; medievalism in contemporary culture; contemporary trans literature; 'global' thought in pre- and early modern England

Doctoral research: My thesis explores failures of feeling in relation to the tradition of highly emotive, Passion-centred medieval devotion known as ‘affective piety’. While late medieval devotional texts often work to stimulate the devotee’s compassion through affective meditation and emotive rhetoric, we also find references to devotees failing to feel as they ought, responding to divine suffering not with tears, but with apathy, frigidity or even callousness. I focus on these ‘stony-hearted’ devotees to ask: what are the challenges of feeling according to the affective logic of medieval devotional texts? What are the consequences of feeling isolated from your emotional community’s dominant affective paradigms? Where might resistance to those affective paradigms ultimately lead? My research breaks new ground in reading for strains in medieval affective piety traditions. It represents a significant contribution not only to medieval studies, but to wider histories of marginal, difficult, and disruptive (un)feeling. 

Teaching: I have taught FHS papers including English 1350-1550 and Lyric 1050-1500, and have experience of dissertation supervision. As a Graduate Development Scholar at St Anne's this year, I'm also teaching Prelims Paper 2 (English 650-1350) and Prelims Paper 1a. 

Publications

-'Memory in Written Record: Memorial Practices at Work in Middle English Copyings of Flyleaf, Marginal and Added Verse', Review of English Studies 73.311 (2022): 632–647

-'Reading the “human braille”: Discourses of Ableism and Medievalism in the Reburial of Richard III', Year's Work in Medievalism 35.36 (2023), open access

-'"Good to feel with, good to think with"? Troubling the Affective Encounter in Medieval Bernardine and Anselmian Marian Dialogues', Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 50.2 (2024): 184-211

-'Archival Fiction as Trans Literature', in The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature, ed. Douglas A. Vakoch and Sabine Sharp (Routledge, 2024) 

-'"I hope þat þer bee noon siche cristen man": The Prick of Jewish "Stony-Heartedness" in Medieval Passion Meditations', in Emotions on the Fringes, ed. Felix Lummer (Trivent, 2024)

-'"You do not get to consent to yourself, even if you might deserve the chance": Nature's Coercion and Transgender Volition in Le Roman de Silence', in Reconsidering Consent and Coercion in Medieval Literature, ed. Hannah Piercy and Jane Bonsall (forthcoming, Brepols, 2024)

I also write general-interest criticism: my work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including The Point, the Times Literary Supplement, Public Books, and Tolka.