Research Interests

Medieval Animal Studies, Sound Studies, and the Environmental Humanities

My first monograph Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts highlights how thinking about sound unsettles fixed assumptions about language in relation to the animal in medieval textual cultures. My work explores the themes of animal sound, noise and language in medieval French and English literature written in Anglo-Norman England, including glossaries and treatises, bestiaries, hagiography, fables, lyric and song. Animal Soundscapes challenges theoretical assumptions in contemporary animal studies by focusing on how language and sound expression is used to redefine networks of relation between humans and nonhumans in the Middle Ages. I consider the ways that texts from the Middle Ages, including the Fables by Marie de France and the Life of Saint Francis of Assisi, use the sounds of beasts and birds to reinforce human exceptionalism whilst simultaneously placing the noises of different creatures back into the mouths of human audiences.

My next project is called Picturing Apocalypse in Medieval Manuscripts. This project considers how ecological crisis and sustainability are represented and told as stories in medieval manuscripts that feature motifs such as Creation, Doomsday and the Flood, animal life and transformation, and management of the environment. My research looks into these themes in light of contemporary discussions in anthropology, ecocriticism, and the the translation of science.

I am also interested in questions of sound and music, and poetry and performance, especially performance-as-research approaches to medieval song.

Publications

Monographs

Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2022).

Articles and Book Chapters

‘The Medieval History of Baiting’ in Hannah O’Regan, Andy Kesson, and Callan Davies (eds), Bears and Baiting in Early Modern England (to be submitted to UCL Press, expected completion date: October 2025), 6,000 words.

‘The Evidence for Bear Baiting in Post-Conquest England and Northern France’, co-authored with Hannah O’Regan (to be submitted to Medieval Archaeology, expected completion date: April 2025), 8,000 words.

‘What does a bear baiting assemblage look like? Interdisciplinary Analysis of an Early Modern ‘Sport’’, co-authored with Elizabeth Wright, Callan Davies, Angela Lamb, Holly Miller, Kevin Rielly, Sophy Charlton, Andy Kesson, Greger Larson, and Hannah J. O’Regan (submitted to Antiquity in Jan. 2024), 8,000 words.

‘Entering the Medieval Literary Space through Modern and Contemporary Storytelling and Performance of the ‘Chastelaine’, in Sophie Marnette (ed.), Mapping Literary Ecosystems: (Re)-positioning and Contextualising the Chastelaine de Vergi (to be submitted to Boydell & Brewer in May, 2024), 8,000 words.

‘The Bear Stage’, co-authored with Andy Kesson, Hannah O’Regan, and Callan Davies, in Emma Whipday (ed.), Shakespeare and Play (Routledge, in press, print run 2024), 3,000 words.

'Sloughing the Lion in Villard de Honnecourt’s Sketchbook’, Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistes (forthcoming, 2024).

‘Eko; Eko; Azarak’: Witchcraft, Medieval Gibberish and Queer Untranslatability in High Magic’s Aid’, in Special Edition, ‘Mainstreaming Queerness: The New Queer Vanguard’, Sexualities, with forward by Professor Heather Love (submitted Jan 2024), 7,000 words.

‘Imaginaires de l’Apocalypse’ (to be submitted to Culture & Recherche, the official journal published by France’s Ministry of Culture, in March 2024), 3,000 words.

‘‘Man spekeþ, bere brayeþ’: the Zoopoetics of Bear Roaring and Silence in the Middle Ages’, Nottingham French Studies, 62.3 (2024), 251–266.

‘Posthuman Bears: Agency in Premodern Bear Baiting in Britain’, in Oliver Grimm (ed.), Bear and Human: Facets of a Multi-Layered Relationship from Past to Recent Times with an Emphasis on Northern Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, Open Access, 2023), pp. 175-186

'‘Rewilding with the ‘Cri’ in Medieval French Texts: Yvain and Mélusine’, French Studies, 77.2 (Open Access, 2023), 167-182.

‘Noise on the Ocean Before ‘Pollution’: The Voyage of Saint Brendan’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 30.1 (2023), 4-24.

‘Animal Umwelt and Sound Milieus in the Middle English Physiologus’, Exemplaria, 34.1 (Open Access, 2022), 24-39.

‘Adeliza of Louvain: Patron’, in Danna Messer (ed), English Consorts: Power, Influence, Dynasty: Normans to Early Plantagenets (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), pp. 83-98.

‘Quacktrap: Glosses and Multilingual Animal Contact in the Tretiz by Walter of Bibbesworth’, in Vincent Debiais and Victoria Turner (eds), Les Mots au Moyen Age / Words in the Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), pp. 161–80.

‘Wolfe Yollez’, The Learned Pig (‘Wolf Crossing’ editorial season, online journal, 2017).

Book reviews

Review: 'Animal Languages in the Middle Ages: Representations of Interspecies Communication', ed. by Alison Langdon, Medium Aevum (forthcoming, 2019).

Review: Sarah Kay, ‘Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries’, French Studies, 72 (2018).

Review: Jameson S. Workman, ‘Chaucer and the Death of the Political Animal’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 38 (2017).

Review: Paul Webster, ‘King John and Religion’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 64.4 (2016).

Review: Miranda Griffin, ‘Transforming Tales: Rewriting Metamorphosis in Medieval French Literature’, French Studies, 70.3 (2016).

Get in Touch

liamgillewis@gmail.com