MA PhD (Dublin)

Lecturer

Contact Details:

• Email: amd13@le.ac.uk
• Tel: +44 (0)116 252 2637

Research Interests

Dr D’Arcy specializes in later Medieval and early Renaissance texts and their contexts. Her research interests lie in the areas of Medieval and Renaissance Wisdom literature, medieval and Renaissance iconology and political theology; the patristic sources of Old and Middle English literature; nineteenth and twentieth-century medievalism.

She has published a number of articles on Old French romance, and Middle English poetry and prose.  Her monograph, Wisdom and the Grail: The Image of the Vessel in the Queste del Saint Graal and Malory’s Tale of the Sankgreal (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2000), provides an iconological reading of the early thirteenth-century Queste del Saint Graal, a branch of the Vulgate or Lancelot-Graal Old French prose cycle, and Malory’s redaction of it. It also, inter alia, provides a comparative iconographic analysis and commentary on the late fourteenth or early fifteenth-century Irish translation of the Queste, Lorgaireacht an tSoidhigh Naomhtha: http://www.fourcourtspress.ie/reviews.php?intProductID=516.  Cf. John Crace, 'Anne Marie D'Arcy: The Da Vinci Code-Breaker', Education Guardian Higher Profile: The Guardian, 23 May 2006: http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/profile/story/0,,1780671,00.html.   

She has also co-edited a collection of essays on Hiberno-Latin, Old English and Anglo-Saxon culture, Text and Gloss: Studies in Insular Language and Literature (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999), and Studies in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Texts in Honour of John Scattergood: ‘The Key of All Good Remembrance’ (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005): http://www.fourcourtspress.ie/reviews.php?intProductID=494. 

She is currently completing The Artifice of Eternity: Mariology in the English Poetic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) which examines the influence of Marian theology, spirituality, liturgy, and iconography as it develops in the English poetic tradition from the turn of the twelfth century to the first half of the seventeenth. 

She is also working on another book, Joyce’s Saints and Sages: The Involution of the Insular Imagination, which not only engages with the Insular and early medieval sources of Finnegans Wake, but also contains chapters on Ulysses and Joyce’s occasional writings on medieval topics. 

Projects

Postgraduate Supervision

Dr D’Arcy has supervised several dissertations at MA level:

The Depiction of Knighthood in Malory; Margery Kempe; Visions of Hell in Middle English; The Figure of Arthur and British Nationalism (AHRB funded); Iconologies of Justice in Medieval English Literature; The Depiction of the Fool in Medieval Drama; The Iconographic Depiction of Christ in the Middle English Lyric (AHRC funded); From Perceval's Sister to Perceval's Cousin in Arthurian Romance; The Origin and Development of Morgan and Nimue in Arthurian Romance (AHRC funded). 

At Ph.D Level:

Current students

• Zoe Enstone,'The Origin and Development of Morgan in Arthurian Literature' (registered 2007, AHRC funded)
• Shazia Jagot, 'Chaucer and Perso-Arabian Natural Philosophy' (registered 2009)

Past students

• Natalie Jones, 'The Development of Christological Imagery in the Middle English Lyric' (2011, AHRC funded). 

Future students

Dr D'Arcy would welcome the opportunity to supervise topics in the following areas:

• Medieval and Renaissance Wisdom Literature
• Medieval and Renaissance Iconology
• Medieval and Renaissance Literature and Political Theology / Canon Law
• Medieval and Renaissance Romance
• Langland, Chaucer, and the Gawain-Poet
• The influence of Monasticism and the Religious Orders on Literature, 1200-1500
• Medieval Mysticism and the Influence of Neo-Platonism in Particular
• Nineteenth and Twentieth-century Medievalism, especially James Joyce

Teaching and Administration

Teaching:

Second Year

• EN2010 Chaucer (Lecturer and Tutor) 
• EN2030 Old English (Lecturer)
• EN2040 Medieval Literature (Lecturer and Tutor)

Third Year

• EN3010 Compulsory Dissertation (Supervisor)
• EN3124  Woman and the Feminine in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Lecturer)
• EN3115 Church and State in Medieval Literature (Lecturer) 

Postgraduate Teaching:

• M.A. in English Studies / MA in Humanities,

Dissertation Supervisor. 

• M.A. in History / MA in Humanities
  I contribute to the core medieval module: Mastering Medieval Sources (convenor: Prof. N. J. Housely) teaching patristics, exegesis and canonicity

Administration:

• Director of the Medieval Research Centre
• Course Convenor of EN2040: Medieval Literature (2004-)
• ERASMUS Coordinator for Outgoing Students (2004-)

Recent Publications

Books

Studies in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Texts in Honour of John Scattergood: ‘The Key of All Good Remembrance’, ed. Anne Marie D’Arcy and Alan J. Fletcher (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005). 

Chapters in books

‘The Middle English Lyric’, in Interpreting Medieval Literature: Readings of Old and Middle English Texts, ed. David F. Johnson and Elaine Treharne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 306-22. 

Review: Richard Dance, Medieval Review, September 2006: 'D’Arcy offers an ‘astute and helpful guide ... navigating the possible sub-classifications of a diverse and interesting genre the recognition in which of “religious” and “secular” types is just the beginning, and exploring themes including images of nature and love, and of women, via close readings of poems’. 

‘“Into the kirk wald not hir self present”: Leprosy, Blasphemy and Heresy in Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid’, in Studies in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Texts in Honour of John Scattergood: ‘The Key of All Good Remembrance’, ed. Anne Marie D’Arcy and Alan J. Fletcher (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), pp. 100-20. 

Reviews: Nicholas Perkins, Times Literary Supplement, 24 March 2006, 33: ‘the powerfully intersecting discourses of leprosy, blasphemy and heresy that Anne Marie D’Arcy traces in Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid’; Jenni Nuttall, Review of English Studies 57 (2006), 575-8: D’Arcy’s ‘convincing’ study assembles ‘compendious evidence from exegetical tradition and legal practice to discern the precise nature of Cresseid’s crime and punishment’. 

Articles in refereed journals

'The Faerie King's Kunstkammer: Imperial Discourse and the Wondrous in Sir Orfeo', Review of English Studies ns 58 (2007), 10-33. 

'"Vartryville" (FW 205.26): Joyce's Sublation of Local Government'  (forthcoming, 2011).   

Full list of publications