Dr. Joanna Bellis
Biography
I am a College Teaching Officer at Christ's, where I am Director of Studies, and teach the medieval and early modern papers, and Practical Criticism. I grew up in northern Cumbria, child of two English teachers, and remain very fond of cold-water swimming and singing on the fells.
Research Interests
I am the author of The Hundred Years War in Literature, 1337-1600 (Cambridge: Brewer, 2016) and editor of John Page's remarkable little-known poetic narrative of Henry V's siege of Rouen in 1418-19, The Siege of Rouen (Heidelberg: Winter, 2015). I co-edited Representing War and Violence, 1250–1600 (Cambridge: Brewer, 2016) with Laura Slater (Art History). I am currently finishing a book titled Verisimilitude and the Medieval Eyewitness, and editing the minor works attributed to Osbern Bokenham (eccentric C15th Augustinian, diehard Yorkist, early humanist, experimental versifier) for the Early English Texts Society: these include the Mappula Angliae or 'Little Napkin of England', the Dialogue at the Grave and the De Consulatu Stilichonis, the only translation of Claudian into Middle English). Recently I have been involved with editing the Prioress's Tale and Second Nun's Tale for CUP's new Complete Works of Chaucer.
Connect with Joanna
Publications
Books
Joanna Bellis, The Hundred Years War in Literature, 1337-1600 (Cambridge: Brewer, 2016)
Joanna Bellis and Laura Slater, ed. Representing War and Violence, 1250–1600 (Cambridge: Brewer, 2016)
John Page, The Siege of Rouen, ed. Joanna Bellis, Middle English Texts 51 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2015)
Articles
The dregs of trembling, the draught of salvation: the dual symbolism of the cup in medieval literature’, in Feasts and Gifts of Food in Medieval Europe: Ritualised Constructions of Hierarchy, Identity and Community, ed. Lars Kjaer and A.J. Watson, special issue of The Journal of Medieval History, 37:1 (March 2011), 47-61.
'Purity and Pueritia: the anti-theme of childhood innocence in late-medieval English courtesy books’, Leeds Studies in English, 42 (2011), 1-16.
‘Rymes sette for a remembraunce: memorialization and mimetic language in the war poetry of the late Middle Ages’, Review of English Studies, 64:264 (2013), 183-207 (awarded the Beatrice White Prize 2015 by the English Association, for 'outstanding scholarly work in the field of English Literature before 1590', noted in The Year's Work in English Studies).
‘Page, John, (1418-1422), poet’, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, stable URL: http://www.oxforddnb.com/ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, September 2013).
‘“We wanted þe trewe copy þereof”: John Page’s The Siege of Rouen, text and transmission’, Medium Ævum, 83:2 (2014), 209-233.
With Venetia Bridges: ‘“What shalt thou do when thou hast an english to make into latin?” A study of the proverb collection of Cambridge, St John’s College, MS F.26’, Studies in Philology, 112.1 (2015), 68-92.
'An Anglo-Danish Naval Encounter in Two Fourteenth-Century Chronicles’, Reading Medieval Studies XLV (2019), 75-107.
‘Manuscript readings we don’t think about in The Prioress’s Tale’, The Chaucer Review, 59:3 (2024), 288-315.
Chapters
1. ‘Mapping the national narrative: place-name etymology in LaÊ’amon’s Brut and its sources’, in Reading LaÊ’amon’s Brut: Approaches and Explorations, ed. Rosamund Allen, Jane Roberts and Carole Weinberg, DQR Studies in Literature, 52 (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2013), pp. 321-42.
2. ‘“The Reader myghte lamente”: The sieges of Calais (1346) and Rouen (1418) in chronicle, poem and play’, in War and Literature, ed. Laura Ashe and Ian Patterson (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2014), pp. 84-106.
3. ‘“Fresch anamalit termes”: the contradictory celebrity of Chaucer’s aureation’, in Chaucer and Fame: Reputation and Reception, ed. Catherine Nall and Isabel Davis (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2015), pp. 143-163.
4. ‘“I Was Enforced to Become an Eyed Witnes”: Documenting War in Medieval and Early Modern Literature’, in Emotions and War: Medieval to Romantic Literature, ed. Stephanie Downes, Andrew Lynch and Katrina O’Loughlin, Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotion (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 133-151.
5. With Laura Slater, ‘Introduction: “Representation” and Medieval Mediations of Violence’, in Representing War and Violence, 1250–1600, ed. Joanna Bellis and Laura Slater (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2016), pp. 1-19.
6. ‘The Hundred Years War’ (overview), ‘Hundred Years War Literature’ (introductory article) and ‘The Chandos Herald’ (short entry), in The Encyclopaedia of Medieval Literature in Britain, Siân Echard and Robert Rouse (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017).
7. ‘Politics and Diplomacy’, and an edited selection from The Siege of Rouen, in Medieval English Travel: A Critical Anthology, ed. Sebastian Sobecki and Anthony Bale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 56–63, 287–302.
8. ‘Propaganda or Parody? Latin Abuse Poetry from the Hundred Years War’, in Crossing Borders in the Insular Middle Ages, ed. Victoria Flood and Aisling Byrne (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), pp. 89-112.
9. With Megan Leitch, ‘Chivalric Literature’, in A Companion to Chivalry, ed. Robert Jones and Peter Coss (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2019), pp. 241-62.
10. ‘King Arthur in the Hundred Years War’, in Littérature Arthurienne Tardive en Europe, ed. Ad Putter, Raluca Radulescu, Christine Ferlampin-Achier and others (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2020).
11. ‘Edward of Woodstock (Black Prince)’ and 'Merton College', in The Chaucer Encyclopaedia, ed. Richard Newhauser, Vincent Gillespie, Jessica Rosenfeld and Katie Walter (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2023).
12. ‘Medieval Continuities’, in the Oxford Handbook of Renaissance Poetry, ed. Andrew Zurcher and Jason Scott-Warren (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).