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Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics

 

Dr Miranda Griffin

Miranda Griffin sitting at her desk
Position(s): 
Associate Professor of Medieval French
Undergraduate Teaching and Examining Officer, French Section
Department/Section: 
French
Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages & Linguistics
Contact details: 
Telephone number: 
+44 (0)1223 762223
Location: 

Murray Edwards College 
Huntingdon Road 
CAMBRIDGE  
CB3 0DF

 

About: 

Miranda Griffin is Associate Professor of Medieval French, and Fellow in French at Murray Edwards College. Her first book, The Object and the Cause in the Vulgate Cycle, was published by Maney in 2005; her second, Transforming Tales: Rewriting Metamorphosis in Medieval French Literature, was published by OUP in 2015. She has also published articles on the medieval French lai and fabliaux, as well as the Ovide moralisé and the poetry of Christine de Pizan. Her current research focuses on the representation of landscape in medieval French literature and manuscript culture. She has contributed to In Our Time programmes (BBC Radio 4) on Christine de Pizan and La Chanson de Roland; and acted as an advisor on a Netflix documentary about fabulous beasts.

As a former comprehensive school student, Miranda is interested in widening participation. She regularly gives outreach lectures to school students.

 

Teaching interests: 
  • Medieval French literature
  • Medieval manuscript culture
  • Manuscript materiality
  • Prose and verse romance
  • Bestiaries
  • The reception of Ovid in medieval French literature
  • Metamorphosis and hybridity
  • Gender
  • The animal turn
  • Ecocriticism

 

Research interests: 
  • Landscape in medieval French narrative
  • Medieval representations of space and time
  • Medieval theories of temporality
  • Ecocriticism and ecomaterialism
  • Text and image in medieval manuscripts

 

Recent research projects: 

L’Image du monde: a thirteenth-century encyclopaedia found in over 100 surviving manuscripts.

 

Published works: 

 

Books

Monographs

Transforming Tales: Rewriting Metamorphosis in Medieval French Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

The Object and the Cause in the Vulgate Cycle, (Oxford: Legenda, 2005).

Edited volume

The Futures of Medieval French Literature: Essays in Honour of Sarah Kay, edited by Jane Gilbert and Miranda Griffin (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2021)

Contributing author

Knowing Poetry in France: From the Rose to the Rhétoriqueurs, by Sarah Kay and Adrian Armstrong, with the participation of Rebecca Dixon, Miranda Griffin, Sylvia Huot, Francesca Nicholson and Finn Sinclair (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011).

 

Book chapters

‘The World in an Egg: Reading Medieval Ecologies’, in Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Environmental Imagination, ed. Giulia Sissa and Francesca Martelli (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), pp. 125-144.*

‘W for Wasteland’, in Wastiary: A Bestiary of Waste, ed. Michael Hennessy Picard, Albert Brenchat-Aguilar, Timothy Carroll, Jane Gilbert, and Nicola Miller, special issue of Think Pieces, (Institute for Advanced Studies, University College London: London, 2023).

(with Jane Gilbert) ‘Introduction’ to The Futures of Medieval French Literature: Essays in Honour of Sarah Kay, edited by Jane Gilbert and Miranda Griffin (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2021), pp. 1-11.

‘Introduction to Part VI: Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries’, in The Futures of Medieval French Literature: Essays in Honour of Sarah Kay, edited by Jane Gilbert and Miranda Griffin (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2021), pp. 283-86.

‘Mélusine and Margaret: Hybrids and Monstrous Maternity’, in Corps hybrides aux frontières de l'humain au Moyen Âge. Actes du colloque international de Louvain-la-Neuve (19-20 avril 2018), ed. Antonella Sciancalepore (Louvain-la-Neuve, Publications de l’Institut d'études médiévales, 2020), pp. 63-82

‘Fortune’s Touch: Reading Transformation in Christine de Pizan’s Mutacion de Fortune’, in Ovidian Transversions: “Iphis and Ianthe,” 1300-1650, ed. Patricia Badir, Peggy McCracken and Valerie Traub (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 99-117.

‘Translation and Transformation in the Ovide moralisé’, in Rethinking Medieval Translation: Ethics, Politics, Theory, edited by Emma Campbell and Robert Mills (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2012), pp 41-60.

‘The Grail’ in The Cambridge History of French Literature, edited by William Burgwinkle, Nicholas Hammond and Emma Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 76-83.

‘The Beastly and the Courtly in Medieval Tales of Transformation’, in The Beautiful and the Monstrous, ed. Amaleena Damlé and Aurélie L’Hostis (Oxford, Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 139-50.

‘Too Many Women: Reading Freud, Derrida and Lancelot’ in Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality and Sight in Medieval Text and Image, ed. Emma Campbell and Robert Mills (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 207-20.

 

Articles

‘On the Trail of the Sibyl’s Mountain: Antoine de la Sale’s Le Paradis de la reine Sibylle’, in Category Crossings: Bruno Latour and Medieval Modes of Existence, ed. Marilynn Desmond and Noah Guynn, special issue of Romanic Review, 111.1 (May 2020), 8-26.

‘Figures in the Landscape: Encounters and Entanglements in the Medieval Wilderness’, Versions of the Natural from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, ed. Sarah Kay and Nicolette Zeeman, special issue of Journal for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 49.3 (September 2019), 501–520.

‘“Unusual greenness”: Approaching Medievalist Ecomaterialism’, Exemplaria, 30.2 (April 2018), 172-181.

‘Imagining Ovid and Chrétien in Fourteenth-Century French Libraries’, French Studies 70 (2016) (Special Issue: The Medieval Library), 201-215.

‘The Time of the Translator in the Ovide moralisé,’ Florilegium 31 (2014), 31-53 (published in 2016).

‘« Dont me revient ceste parole ? » Echo, voice and citation in Le Lai de Narcisse and Cristal et Clarie Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistes, 22 (2012), 59-74.

 ‘The Space of Transformation: Merlin Between Two Deaths’, Medium Aevum, 80 (2011), 85-103.

‘Animal Origins in Perceforest’, Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistes, 21 (2011), 169-84.

‘Transforming Fortune: Reading and Chance in Christine de Pizan’s Mutacion de Fortune and Chemin de long estude’, Modern Language Review, 104 (2009), 55-70.

‘Writing Out the Sin: Charlemagne, Arthur and the Spectre of Incest’, Neophilologus, 88 (2004), 499-519.

‘Dirty Stories: Abjection in the Fabliaux’, New Medieval Literatures, 3 (2000), 229-60.

‘Gender and Authority in the Medieval French Lai’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 35 (1999), 42-56.

 

Translations

Translation of excerpt of the Ovide moralisé, in collaboration with Blake Gutt and Peggy McCracken, in Ovidian Transversions: “Iphis and Ianthe,” 1300-1650, ed. Patricia Badir, Peggy McCracken and Valerie Traub (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), pp. 279-86.

Translation of excerpt of Christine de Pizan, La Mutacion de Fortune, in Ovidian Transversions: “Iphis and Ianthe,” 1300-1650, edited by Patricia Badir, Peggy McCracken and Valerie Traub, ed. Patricia Badir, Peggy McCracken and Valerie Traub (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), pp. 288-89.