Dr James Wade, Girton

jpw49@cam.ac.uk

 

 

Biographical Information

James Wade is a College Associate Professor, Fellow, and Director of Studies at Girton.

Research Interests

James Wade’s work explores the entanglements of literature, folklore, and song from the Middle Ages forward. He is the author of Fairies in Medieval Romance, and the editor of the fifteenth-century English romance Sir Torrent of Portingale. He has published articles on English literature from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Shakespeare, including several on Sir Thomas Malory’s monumental prose romance Le Morte Darthur.

He has written on medieval minstrels and live comedy: https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/bawdy-bard-act-discovered-revealing-fifteenth-century-roots-of-british-comedy

And, with Seb Falk, on the lost ‘Song of Wade’: https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/song-of-wade-lost-english-legend-decoded

Selected Publications

Books

  • Sir Torrent of Portingale (ed.). Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2017
  • Fairies in Medieval Romance. The New Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

Articles

  • with Seb Falk, ‘The Lost Song of Wade: Peterhouse 255 Revisited’. The Review of English Studies, 76 (2025), 339-65
  • ‘Entertainments from a Medieval Minstrel’s Repertoire Book’, The Review of English Studies, 74 (2023), 605–618.
  • 'Supernatural’, ‘Fairy’, and ‘Elf-Queene’ in The Chaucer Encyclopaedia, gen. ed. Richard Newhauser (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2023)
  • ‘A History of Malory’s Morte Darthur in Print’, in The Arthurian World, ed. by Renée Ward, Victoria Coldham-Fussell, and Miriam Edlich-Muth (London: Routledge, 2022)
  • 'Penitential Romance After the Reformation', in Medieval Into Renaissance, ed. by Matthew Woodcock and Andrew King (Cambridge: Brewer, 2016), pp. 91-106
  • 'Romance, Affect and Ethical Thinking in a Fifteenth-Century Household Book: Chetham’s Library MS 8009', New Medieval Literatures, 15 (2015), 255-83
  • ‘The Chapter Headings of the Morte Darthur: Caxton and de Worde’, Modern Philology, 110 (2014), 645-667
  • ‘Confession, Inquisition and Exemplarity in The Erle of Toulousand Other Middle English Romances’, in The Culture of Inquisition in Medieval England, ed. by Mary Flannery and Katie Walter (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), pp. 112-29
  • ‘Arbitrariness and Knowing in Malory’s Morte Darthur, Book IV:18-21’, Studies in Philology, 110.1 (2013), 18-42
  • Ungallant Knights’, in Heroes and Anti-Heroes in Medieval Romance, ed. by Neil Cartlidge (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), pp. 201-18
  • ‘Malory’s Marginalia Reconsidered’, Arthuriana, 21.3 (2011), 70-86
  • Abduction, Surgery, Madness: An Account of a Little Red Man in Thomas Walsingham’s Chronica Maiora’, Medium Ævum, 77 (2008), 10-29