Dr Lucy Brookes

I read and work on the secular literature written in England during the high to late Middle Ages. I completed my BA at Worcester College, Oxford, before specialising in Medieval Literatures and Languages during my Masters at the University of York. I then returned to Worcester and Oxford for my DPhil in English.

My first book, Convention and the Individual in Medieval English Romance (under contract with Boydell & Brewer) is a study of character and subjectivity. There I argue that by reading romance for its conventions, new readings of much-neglected texts emerge.

Alongside the preparation of my first book, I am beginning to think about several new projects. The first of these is a study of veracity and ‘truthfulness’ in Middle English literature. In an article published in New Medieval Literatures, I used the modern coinage ‘truthiness’ to interrogate the tendency for romances (obviously and indeed self-consciously fictional texts) to claim to be telling the truth at moments when they are most sensational and extraordinary. I think that there are compelling parallels to be drawn between the semantic slipperiness of ‘trouthe’ in the later Middle Ages, and our own ‘Post-Truth’ era; this project will start with romance, but build out to encompass other popular ‘fictional’ genres of the period.   
 
I am also working on several smaller articles that use recent work in the History of Emotions and Affect Theory to read romance. Other research interests include Arthurian literature (medieval and modern), late medieval drama, ballads, TV soap operas and Westerns, and narratology.

In the year 2024-25 I am also the Access Officer at Merton. As a state-educated academic myself, I am committed to widening access and participation to higher education, and I enjoy working with schools to demystify Oxford and/or the study of English at university level.

At Merton I teach the medieval papers Prelims 2 (Literature in English, 650-1350) and FHS 2 (Literature in English, 1350-1550), as well as Prelims 1A (English Language). I serve as director of studies for students pursuing Course II at the college, and teach specialised papers for this course (previously Lyric, currently Romance). I also supervise undergraduate and MSt dissertations on a range of medieval topics. In 2019-20 I was an Ashmolean Junior Teaching Fellow as part of the Krasis programme; I always enjoy the chance to use objects and especially Oxford’s wonderful museum collections in my teaching.