Shannon Gayk
Associate Professor
Ph.D., University of Notre Dame, 2005
M.A., University of Notre Dame, 2004
B.A., Duke University, 1998
My research investigates late-medieval religious culture and writing and focuses especially on writers’ engagements and experimentation with material culture, theology, popular piety, and literary form in the fifteenth century. I recently completed a book on religious art, vernacular literature, and reformist theologies in fifteenth-century England entitled Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth Century England (Cambridge UP, 2010) and co-edited a collection of essays, Form and Reform: Reading Across the Fifteenth Century (Ohio State UP, forthcoming, Oct 2011), that also explores the ways in which writers think about literary form in relation to the larger cultural shifts of the second half of the fifteenth century.
While my first monograph focused on how late-medieval authors understood, represented, and theorized material forms, I am currently at work on a new project, tentatively titled Lyrical Transformations: Religious Cultures and the English Lyric, 1380-1557, that considers how late medieval writers theorize literary form and specifically that of the religious lyric. This book will explore the larger historical and social pressures placed on lyric and lyric readers, examine the relationship between medieval theories and practices of poetry, and read lyric beyond the period boundaries of the medieval. The project reads lyric over the course of the long Reformation in England, bookended by Wycliffite writing at the end of the fourteenth century and reformist poetry in the early sixteenth century. Rather than tracing a linear arc across three centuries, this project is structured thematically around the religious lyric’s affiliations with song, material culture, subjectivity and inwardness, and narrative and prose. I also continue to work on early English material culture and am currently completing a set of articles on the literary depiction of the arma christi iconographic tradition from the fourteenth through the early seventeenth centuries.
Recent Courses
L142: Ethical Animals
L205: Introduction to Poetry
L213: Literary Masterpieces
E301: Literary Visions: Sacred and Profane
L305: The Canterbury Tales
L306: Medieval Appetites
L383: Literature and the Religious Object in Early England
L471 : The Nature Lyric
L613: The Long Fifteenth Century
L707/L713: Lyric Theory
L758: Word and Image
Research Highlights (click images for more information)
Books:
Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth Century England (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Form and Reform: Reading Across the Fifteenth Century, edited with Kathleen Tonry (forthcoming, The Ohio State University Press, 2011).
Lyrical Transformations: Religious Cultures and the English Lyric, 1380-1557 (in progress)
Articles:
“‘To wondre upon this thyng’: Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale.” Exemplaria 22.2 (2010).
“Lollard Texts, Literary Critics, and the Meaningfulness of Form.” In Lollard Controversies, eds. Mishtooni Bose and J. Patrick Hornbeck(Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming in 2011).
“‘Ete this book’: Literary Consumption and Poetic Invention in Capgrave’s Life of St. Katherine,” in Form and Reform (Columbus: Ohio State UP, forthcoming 2011).
“Teaching Chaucer’s Legacy,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 15:1 (2008): 91-104.
“‘Among psalms to fynde a cleer sentence’: John Lydgate, Eleanor Hull, and the Art of Vernacular Exegesis,” New Medieval Literatures 10 (2008): 165-192.
“Images of Pity: The Regulatory Aesthetics of John Lydgate’s Religious Poetry,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 28 (2006): 175-203.
“‘As Plouзmen han preued’: The Alliterative Work of a Set of Lollard Sermons” Yearbook of Langland Studies 20 (2006): 43-65.
Recent Talks:
“‘As Plou?men han preued’: The Alliterative Work of a Set of Lollard Sermons” Yearbook of Langland Studies 20 (2006): 43-65.
“Langland, Lollards, and Reform,” Invited panelist for session in honor of Larry Clopper. 45th International Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo, MI, May 2010.
“Lyrical Pain: Seeing, Reading, Feeling the Arma Christi,” Harvard Medieval Colloquium, March 2010.
“Lyric Materialities,” MLA Annual Convention, Philadelphia, PA, December 2009.
“Pricking the Conscience with Image and Word,” Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies Conference, Villanova University, October 2009.
