Profile

Biography

Educated at the Universities of Toronto (BA, MA) and Oxford (MPhil, DPhil), Nicola McDonald came to York from a lectureship at St John's College, Oxford. Her current research focuses on two distinct projects:

• The cultural audacity of Middle English popular romance, the most important secular genre to emerge from the middle ages and one that has been systematically diminished in modern academic discourse. This project takes as its starting point that romance (the ancestor of the modern novel as well as most forms of popular fiction) is a precocious space for the making of fiction and for the exploration of cultural norms, boundaries and transgressions.
• Mulier ludens: medieval women at play. Recent research on late medieval women has demonstrated their sophisticated devotional literacy and important role in networks of piety. This project seeks to complicate our picture of medieval women's cultural practices by examining the fragmentary evidence of ludic culture. It focuses in particular on erotic verbal games, conduct and comic verse and the rare insight these offer into women's social and sexual worlds.

Nicola McDonald's other research interests include Gower, Chaucer, manuscript illumination, space in text and image, the practice of fiction, crossing boundaries (of chronology, discipline, genre), and the obscene. She co-organizes the international Medieval Romance Society and, at York, she organizes the Romance Research Group. She is also an active member of the interdisciplinary Household Research Group and is setting up an international network for the study of popular romance.

Departmental roles

• Chair, Board of Studies
  Please contact by email via english-chairbos@york.ac.uk

Research

Supervision

Nicola McDonald is currently supervising six PhD students on a diverse range of single and interdisciplinary topics broadly related to medieval romance: a theoretically informed analysis of the dysfunctional romance household; sacred space and the dynamics of romance; fatherhood in romance, mercantile and gentry culture; a White Rose funded edition of Richard Coeur de Lion, England's cannibal king; and close contextual readings of gender, social class, space and conduct in individual household manuscripts. She has also supervised a dissertation on the dismembered body in medieval England.

She welcomes PhD proposals on most aspects of medieval English romance, whether single discipline or interdisciplinary (at the intersections of literature with history, art history or archaeology). In addition, she is interested in supervising topics on women and gender, Gower, late medieval vernacular culture and more generally topics that seek to break period and discipline boundaries.

Publications

Selected publications

• N. McDonald, ed., Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays in Popular Romance, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. American Library Association, 2005 Outstanding Academic Title (Medieval Studies), including:
• 'A Polemical Introduction', pp. 1-16.
• 'Eating People and the Alimentary Logic of Richard Coeur de Lion', pp. 124-50
• N. McDonald, ed. and introd., Medieval Obscenities, York: York Medieval Press, 2006
• 'Fragments of (Have Your) Desire: Brome Women at Play' in Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing and Household, eds. P.J.P. Goldberg and M. Kowaleski (forthcoming)
• 'Games Medieval Women Play', in The Legend of Good Women: Context and Reception, ed. C. Collette (Cambridge: 2006), pp. 176-97
• 'Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, Ladies at Court and the Female Reader', Chaucer Review, 35, 2000, 22-42
• 'The Seege of Troye: "ffor wham was wakened al this wo"' in The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, eds. A. Putter and J. Gilbert (Harlow, Essex, 2000), 181-99
• 'lusti tresor: Avarice and the Economics of the Erotic in Gower's Confessio Amantis', Treasure in the Medieval West, ed. E.M. Tyler (York: 2000), pp. 135-56