Professor Rosalind Brown-Grant

Profile

I graduated in French and Italian from the University of Manchester in 1986 and was awarded my PhD, on the works in defence of women by the late medieval author Christine de Pizan, from the University of Manchester in 1994. I was a member of staff in French at Leeds from 1991 to 2023, but am now retired from teaching.

Research interests

Research awards:

• KU Leuven Institute LECTIO: Visiting Fellowship (May-June 2024)
• Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Science: Senior Research Fellowship (February 2019-June 2019).
• Leverhulme Trust: Senior Research Fellowship (June 2018-January 2019). 
• Le Studium Institute for Advanced Studies, Orléans, France: Research Fellowship (September 2011-August 2012). 
• Arts and Humanities Research Council: Research Leave (February - June 2010).
• Leverhulme Trust: Major Research Fellowship (October 2004-October 2006).  
• Arts and Humanities Research Council: Research Leave (February - June 2000).

Research collaborations:

• The Joust as Performance: Pas d'armes and Late Medieval Chivalry: funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council (October 2020-September 2022). PI: Rosalind Brown-Grant, Co-I: Mario Damen (University of Amsterdam). The website for this project on the pas d’armes (a ritualised tournament form that was popular in the 15th and early 16th centuries), which features a virtual exhibition and a research database, has now gone live: see www.pasdarmes.org. 
• Power and the Paratext: Inscribing Knowledge in Medieval Manuscript Culture: funded by Le Studium Institute for Advanced Studies, Orléans, France (May 2014-June 2017). PI: Rosalind Brown-Grant
• Text/Image Relations in Medieval French and Burgundian Culture (Fourteenth-Sixteenth Centuries): funded by British Academy (September 2010-September 2011). PI: Rosalind Brown-Grant
• Voices in Medieval French Narrative Symposium: funded by British Academy (September 2008-September 2009). PIs: Helen Swift and Sophie Marnette (University of Oxford)

Publications:

My research has focused to date on five main areas: Christine de Pizan, late medieval French romance, Burgundian historiographical writing, text-image relations in medieval manuscripts, and tournament culture. I have also edited and translated several Middle French texts. 

Single-authored monographs:

• Visualizing Justice in Burgundian Prose Romance: Text and Image in Manuscripts of the Wavrin Master (1450s-1460s) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020).
• French Romance of the Later Middle Ages: Gender, Morality, and Desire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
• Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defence of Women: Reading beyond Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

 Edited volumes: 

• Pas d’armes and Late Medieval Chivalry: A Casebook, ed. Rosalind Brown-Grant and Mario Damen (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2024).
• Inscribing Knowledge in the Medieval Book: The Power of Paratexts, ed. Rosalind Brown-Grant, Patrizia Carmassi, Gisela Drossbach, Anne D. Hedeman, Victoria Turner and Iolanda Ventura (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019). 
• Text/Image Relations in Medieval French and Burgundian Culture (Fourteenth-Sixteenth Centuries), ed. Rosalind Brown-Grant and Rebecca Dixon (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015). 
• Textual and Visual Representations of Power and Justice in Medieval France: Manuscripts and Early Printed Books, ed. Rosalind Brown-Grant, Anne D. Hedeman and Bernard Ribémont (Farnham, Surrey/Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2015).
• Contexts and Continuities: Proceedings of the IVth International Colloquium on Christine de Pizan (Glasgow 21-27 July 2000), published in honour of Liliane Dulac, ed. Angus J. Kennedy, with Rosalind Brown-Grant, James C. Laidlaw and Catherine M. Müller, 3 vols (Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press, 2002).  

Scholarly editions and translations: 

• Ten translated primary sources in Pas d’armes and Late Medieval Chivalry: A Casebook, ed. Rosalind Brown-Grant and Mario Damen (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2024). 
• A Chivalric Life: The Book of the Deeds of Messire Jacques de Lalaing, trans. Rosalind Brown-Grant and Mario Damen (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2022).
• Pierre de La Cépède, Paris et Vienne, ed. Marie-Claude de Crécy and Rosalind Brown-Grant (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2015).
• Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1999). 

Book chapters:   

• Encyclopedia entry, “Paratext”, in Handbook of Medieval Book Ornament, ed. David Ganz, Thomas Rainer, Sabrina Schmid and Katharina Theil (forthcoming in 2025).
• “Pas d’armes and the Construction of Chivalric Masculinity: Ethics and Erotics of Knightly Combat”, in Pas d’armes and Late Medieval Chivalry: A Casebook, ed. Rosalind Brown-Grant and Mario Damen (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2024), pp. 475-501.
• "Art imitating life imitating art? Representations of the pas d’armes in Burgundian Prose Romance: The Case of Jehan d’Avennes", The Medieval Tournament as Spectacle, ed. Alan V. Murray and Karen Watts (Leeds/Woodbridge: Royal Armouries/Boydell, 2020), pp. 139-54. 
• "Prologues and frontispieces in prose romance manuscripts", in Inscribing Knowledge in the Medieval Book: The Power of Paratexts, ed. Rosalind Brown-Grant, Patrizia Carmassi, Gisela Drossbach, Anne D. Hedeman, Victoria Turner and Iolanda Ventura (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), pp. 247-64. 
• "Jacques de Lalaing and chivalric biography", in A Knight for the Ages: Jacques de Lalaing and the Art of Chivalry, ed. Elizabeth Morrison (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2018), pp. 64-75. 
• "Pour une lecture juridique du texte: le Roman de Gérard de Nevers vu par le Maître de Wavrin", in L'Art du récit à la cour de Bourgogne: l'activité de Jean de Wavrin et de son atelier, ed. Jean Devaux and Matthieu Marchal (Paris: Champion, 2018), pp. 295-312.
• "Personal drama or chivalric spectacle? The reception of the Roman d’Olivier de Castille in the illuminations of the Wavrin Master and Loyset Liédet’, in Text/Image Relations in Medieval French and Burgundian Culture (Fourteenth-Sixteenth Centuries), ed. Rosalind Brown-Grant and Rebecca Dixon (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), pp. 123-139.
• "How to wield power with Justice: The fifteenth-century Roman de Florimont as a Burgundian “mirror for princes”’, in Textual and Visual Representations of Power and Justice in Medieval France: Manuscripts and Early Printed Books, ed. Rosalind Brown-Grant, Anne D. Hedeman and Bernard Ribémont (Farnham, Surrey/Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 43-63.
• "Le rapt et le rapport texte/image dans les manuscrits du remaniement bourguignon de La Fille du Comte de Ponthieu", in Rapts. Réalités et imaginaire du Moyen Âge aux Lumières, ed. Gabriele Vickermann-Ribémont and Myriam White-Le Goff (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014), pp. 49-70.
• "Commemorating the chivalric hero: text, image, violence and memory in the Livre des fais de messire Jacques de Lalaing’, in Commemorating Violence: The Writing of History in the Francophone Middle Ages, ed. Noah Guynn and Zrinka Stahuljak (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2013), pp. 169-86.
• 'Mise en prose et remise en question du rôle de l'amour dans la formation de l'identité chevaleresque: l'exemple de Blancandin', in Mettre en prose aux XIVe-XVIe siècles, ed. Maria Colombo Timelli, Barbara Ferrari, Anne Schoysman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), pp. 87-96.
• "Gérard de Nevers: a Roman de la Violette moralisé? Mise en prose and the revalorisation of the courtly lady in the 'cycle de la gageure"', in Essays in later medieval French literature. The legacy of Jane H. M. Taylor, ed. Rebecca Dixon, Durham Modern Languages Series (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), pp. 21-34.  
• "Ré-écritures de récits d'inceste: Jehan Wauquelin et la légende de la 'fille aux mains coupées", in Jean Wauquelin, de Mons à la cour de Bourgogne, ed. Marie-Claude de Crécy, with Gabriella Parussa and Sandrine Hériché Pradeau (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), pp. 111-122.
• "Les rapports de force dans la liaison amoureuse chez Christine de Pizan, Alain Chartier et Antoine de La Sale", in L'Analisi Linguistica e Letteraria, 12 (2004), Actes du IIème Colloque International sur la Littérature en Moyen Français, ed. Sergio Cigada, Anna Slerca, Giovanna Bellati, Monica Barsi (Milan: Pubblicazioni dell'Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore),  pp. 593-611.
• "Writing beyond gender: Christine de Pizan's linguistic strategies in the defence of women", in Contexts and Continuities: Proceedings of the IVth International Colloquium on Christine de Pizan (Glasgow 21-27 July 2000), published in honour of Liliane Dulac, ed. Angus J. Kennedy, with Rosalind Brown-Grant, James C. Laidlaw and Catherine M. Müller, 3 vols (Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press, 2002), vol. I, pp. 155-70.
• "Mirroring the court: Clerkly advice to noble men and women in the works of Philippe de Mézières and Christine de Pizan", in Courtly Literature and Clerical Culture: Selected Papers from the Tenth Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society, Universität Tübingen, Deutschland 28. Juli-3. August 2001, ed. Christoph Huber and Henrike Lähnemann (Tübingen: Attempto Verlag, 2002), pp. 39-56.
• "Christine de Pizan as a defender of women", in Christine de Pizan: A Casebook, ed. Barbara K. Altmann and Deborah L. McGrady (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 81-100.
• "Christine de Pizan: feminist linguist avant la lettre?", in Christine de Pizan 2000: Studies in Honour of Angus J. Kennedy, ed. John Campbell and Nadia Margolis (Amsterdam; Rodopi, 2000), pp. 65-76.
• “Miroir du prince, miroir d’amour: L'Epistre Othea of Christine de Pizan and the Confessio Amantis of John Gower”, in Sur le chemin de longue étude…Actes du colloque d’Orléans Juillet 1995, ed. Bernard Ribémont (Paris: Champion, 1998), pp. 25-44.
• “Des hommes et des femmes illustres: modalités narratives et transformations génériques chez Pétrarque, Boccace et Christine de Pizan”, in Une femme de Lettres au Moyen Age: Etudes autour de Christine de Pizan, ed. Liliane Dulac and Bernard Ribémont (Orléans: Paradigme, 1995), pp. 480-96.
• “Illumination as Reception: Jean Miélot’s Reworking of the Epistre Othea’, in The City of Scholars: New Approaches to Christine de Pizan, ed. Margarete Zimmermann and Dina De Rentiis, European Cultures: Studies in Literature and the Arts, 2 (New York and Berlin: De Gruyter, 1994), pp. 260-71.
•  “Les exilées du pouvoir? Christine de Pizan et la femme devant la crise du Moyen Age finissant”, in Apogée et déclin, Colloque de l'URA 411, Provins, 1991, ed. Claude Thomasset and Michel Zink (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris Sorbonne, 1993), pp. 211-24.
•  “L’Avision Christine: Autobiographical Narrative or Mirror for the Prince?”, in Politics, Gender and Genre: The Political Thought of Christine de Pizan, ed. Margaret Brabant  (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1992), pp. 95-111.

 Journal articles: 

• “L’œuvre enluminée du ‘Maître de Wavrin’: un corpus de romans bourguignons très original”, Nord’, 82 (2023), pp. 45-63. 
• “Pour une lecture politique et juridique de la mise en prose bourguignonne de Florence de Rome: les rapports texte-image dans Chantilly, Bibliothèque du château, ms. 652”, Bien Dire et Bien Aprandre, 36 (2021), pp. 195-214. 
• "Perspectives sur la guerre: l'apport textuel et visuel des romans en prose bourguignons", Le Moyen Age, 25/1 (2019), pp. 111-28.
• "Fraternité et chevalerie dans la mise en prose bourguignonne de Florence de Rome (Chantilly, Bibliothèque du château, ms. 652)", Tirant, 22 (2019), pp. 119-44.
• "Visualizing justice in Burgundian prose romance: the Roman de Gérard de Nevers illuminated by Loyset Liédet and the Wavrin Master", Gesta, 57/1 (2018), pp. 69-93.
• "Laughing at or with the text: the 'Wavrin Master' as illuminator of Burgundian prose romance", Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistes (XIIIe-XVe s.), 30 (2015), pp. 407-19 (text) and 455-59 (colour plates).
• "Narrative style in Burgundian prose romances of the later Middle Ages", Romania, 130/2  (2012), 130/2 (2012), pp. 355-406.
• "Narrrative style in Burgundian chronicles of the later Middle Ages", Viator, 42,2 (2011), pp. 233-82.
• "Narrative voice and hybrid style in chivalric biography", Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistes (XIIIe-XVe s.), 22 (2011), pp. 25-41.
• "The three versions of Paris et Vienne", Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistes (XIIIe-XVe s.), 20, (2010), pp. 59-70.
• "Learning to be a good husband: competing masculine identities in the Roman du Comte d'Artois", Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales (XIIIe-XVe siècles), 9 (2002), pp. 179-197.
• “‘Hee! Quel honneur au femenin sexe!’: Female heroism in Christine de Pizan's Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc”, Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies, 5 (1997), pp. 123-34; reprinted in Writers and Heroines: Essays on Women in French Literature, ed. Shirley Jones Day (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), pp. 15-30.

Student education

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Research groups and institutes

• French
• Gender
• Heritage
• Literary studies