Maura Nolan
Associate Professor
Wheeler Hall, room 230
mnolan@berkeley.eduSpecialties
?
Middle EnglishRenaissance and Early ModernDrama
Professional Statement
I work on late medieval English literature, with a special focus on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the vexed relationship between the “medieval” and the “Renaissance.”? I am especially interested in defining and articulating the role of the aesthetic in late medieval vernacular literature, particularly in relation to?variable cultural understandings of sensation and cognition. I am currently working on two projects. The first focuses on the place of contingency and sensation in the work of John Gower, while the second addresses?notions of the beautiful and the sublime in medieval literature as they relate to an emerging notion of literary style.??
Maura Nolan received her A.B. from Dartmouth College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Duke University. Before coming to Berkeley in 2005, she taught at the University of Notre Dame.
Books During the fifteenth century John Lydgate was the most famous poet in England, filling commissions for the court, the aristocracy, and the guilds. He wrote for an elite London readership that was historically very small, but that saw itself as domin....(read more)
FIELDS:
Renaissance and Early Modern
Selected Publications and Papers Delivered
“Medieval Habit, Modern Sensation:? Reading Manuscripts in the Digital Age.” Chaucer Review 47.4 (April, 2013): 465-76; ?special issue on Medieval English Manuscripts:? Form, Aesthetics, and the Literary Text, ed. Alexandra Gillespie and Arthur Bahr.
“Aesthetics.&rdquoIn A Handbook of Middle English Studies. Ed. Marion Turner.? London: Blackwell, 2013. 223-38.
“Medieval Sensation and Modern Aesthetics:? Aquinas, Adorno, Chaucer.” The Minnesota Review 80 (2013): 145-58.
“Performing Lydgate’s Broken Back Meter.” In Interpretation and Performance: Essays in Honors of Alan T. Gaylord.? Ed. Susan Yager and Elise Morse Gagne. Provo, Utah: The Chaucer Studio Press, 2013. 141-59.
“Agency and the Poetics of Sensation in Gower’s Mirour de l’Omme.” In Answerable Style:? the Idea of the Literary in Medieval England. Ed. Andy Galloway and Frank Grady.? Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2013. 214-243.
“The Poetics of Catastrophe:? Ovidian Allusions in Gower’s Vox Clamantis.” ?Medieval Latin and Middle English Literature:? Essays in Honour of Jill Mann. Ed. Christopher Cannon and Maura Nolan.? Cambridge:? Boydell and Brewer, 2011. 113-133.
“Style.”Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History. Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature. Ed. Brian Cummings and James Simpson.? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 396-419.
“The New Fifteenth Century:? Humanism, Heresy, and Laureation.” Philological Quarterly? 87 (2008): 174-192.
“Historicism after Historicism.” In The Post-Historical Middle Ages. Ed. Sylvia Federico and Elizabeth Scala.? New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2009. 63-85.
“The Fortunes of Piers Plowman and its Readers.” Yearbook of Langland Studies 20 (2007 for 2006): 1-41.
“Lydgate’s Worst Poem.”? In Lydgate Matters. Ed. Andrea Denny-Brown and Lisa Cooper.? New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2007. 71-87.
“Beauty.”? Twenty-First Century Approaches:? Medieval. Ed. Paul Strohm.? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. ?207-221.
English Department Classes
fall, 2022
45A/1
Literature in English: Through Milton
Introductory Surveys
45A/101 -- discussion section
No instructor assigned yet.
111/1
Chaucer
Pre-1800 Requirement
Middle English
211/1
Chaucer
Graduate Courses
spring, 2022
250/1
Research Seminars: Sensation and Participation from Chaucer to Spenser
Graduate Courses
fall, 2021
375/1
The Teaching of Composition and Literature
Graduate Courses
spring, 2020
166/7
Special Topics: Arthurian Romance
Pre-1800 Requirement
Old English
Middle English
Special Topics
166/701 -- discussion section
No instructor assigned yet.
166/702 -- discussion section
No instructor assigned yet.
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