Dr Mary Boyle

Junior Research Fellow, Linacre College

Mary Boyle, BA (KCL), M.St., D.Phil (Oxon)

Research

Mary Boyle is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, working on cross-cultural Anglo-German medievalism in the long nineteenth century. During this period, German- and English-language writers created distinct visions of the Middle Ages by translating, adapting, and rewriting one another’s medieval literature. These nations’ contemporary and historical constructions of the national and transnational past are interdependent, and research in this area is deeply relevant in today’s political climate, in which populist narratives depend on selective interpretations of medieval and modern history. 

Mary also works on medieval German and English comparative literature more broadly, and particularly on medieval religious writing. Her monograph, Writing the Jerusalem Pilgrimage in the Late Middle Ages was published in 2021 (DS Brewer). Her further research interests include the interaction of text, image, and material object in printed books and manuscripts. She is the co-founder of Teaching the Codex, an interdisciplinary project on the teaching of manuscript studies, and a Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College.  In 2017, Mary was a Visiting Researcher at the Großbritannien-Zentrum/Centre for British Studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and from 2017-2020, she was an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at Maynooth University. 

Teaching

Mary primarily teaches medieval German literature (Paper VI, Paper IX, Prelims Paper XII) and has co-taught the Master’s-level History of the Book course. She also offers tutorials on Minnesang for the English Faculty’s Medieval Lyric paper. 

Publications

Books

• Writing the Jerusalem Pilgrimage in the Late Middle Ages (DS Brewer, 2021) (monograph).

• Violent Victorian Medievalism (Treasures of the Taylorian Series Three: Cultural Memory 4, 2022) (exhibition catalogue). Ebook available as a free download.

• International Medievalisms (DS Brewer, 2023) (edited volume).

Book Chapters

•  ‘Imaginatio, Anachronismus und Heilsgeschichte’ (with Annette Volfing) in Geschichte Erzählen, ed. Sarah Bowden, Manfred Eikelmann, Stephen Mossman, and Michael Stolz (Narr, 2020).

• ‘Emma Letherbrow’s Gudrun: Kudrun for ‘modern’ Victorians’ in International Medievalisms, ed. Mary Boyle (D.S. Brewer, 2023).

Journal Articles

• ‘Medievalist Forgery? Editions, Adaptations, and Translations of Kudrun in the Nineteenth Century’ (postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, forthcoming 2024)

• ‘Hardly gear for woman to meddle with’: Kriemhild’s Violence in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Versions of the Nibelungenlied (Translation and Literature, 30.2 (2021), 170-197).

• ‘To Gaze or Not to Gaze: The Nineteenth-century Der arme Heinrich from Volksbuch to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Miracle-Rhyme”’ (Modern Language Review, 114.2 (2019), 181-211).

• ‘Merton College, MS. 315: An Introduction’ (Oxford German Studies, 46.2 (2017), 213–16).

• ‘Converting Corpses: The Religious Other in the Munich Oswald and St Erkenwald’ (Oxford German Studies, 44.2 (2015), 113–35).

• ‘William Wey’s Itinerary to the Holy Land: Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 565 (c. 1470)’ (Bodleian Library Record, 28.1 (2015), 22–36).

Popular Articles and Free-to-Access Publications

• Recording of ‘Writing the Jerusalem Pilgrimage’, a talk given at the University of Portland’s Garaventa Center (2 February 2022).

• ‘Bad mothers: women in children’s literature’ (The Tablet, 1 January 2022) (free with registration). This piece appeared in the print edition under the title ‘The land of make-believe’.

• ‘Blood, Stones and Holy Bones’ (History Today, Volume 71, 6 June 2021) (open access).

• ‘In the proxy footsteps of the past’ (The Tablet, 8 April 2021) (free with registration).

• ‘Writing the Jerusalem Pilgrimage in the Late Middle Ages’ (Medieval Herald, 45, June 2021) (open access).

Book Review

• Review of Rüsenberg (2016) (Modern Language Review, 113.1 (2018), 259–61).

Translations

• Verse translations of thirteen poems (Der Wanderer: Schubert Lieder, Delphian, 2016).

• Two chapter translations in The Impact of Idealism (vol. 3), ed. Jamme and Cooper (CUP, 2013).

Work in Progress

• Holy Land Pilgrimage Texts, c. 300-1550 (co-editor, Brill).

• ‘Das Volk’ and ‘Us English Teutones’ (author).