Dr Anne Marie D'Arcy
Personal details | Publications | Research | Teaching | Supervision | Impact, Outreach, and Media
Associate Professor in Medieval and Renaissance Language and Literature
MA, PhD (DUBLIN), FSA; FRHistS
Department: English
Telephone: +44 (0)116 252 2637
Email: amd13@le.ac.uk
Office: Room 1404, Attenborough Tower
Address: School of Arts, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH
Personal details
Biography
I specialise in later Medieval and early Renaissance texts and their contexts. My 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; and nineteenth and twentieth-century medievalism, especially James Joyce.
From 2007-17 I served as Co-director of the University's Medieval Research Centre.
Qualifications
- BA (Mod), University of Dublin, Trinity College
- MA, University of Dublin, Trinity College
- PhD, University of Dublin, Trinity College
- Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries
- Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
Publications
Books

- Joyce and the Irish Middle Ages: Saints, Sages and Insular Culture (Routledge, forthcoming 2021)
- With John McCafferty and Jason McElligot, James Joyce: Apocalypse and Exile (Marsh’s Library, 2014)
- Wisdom and the Grail: The Image of the Vessel in the Queste del Saint Graal and Thomas Malory’s Tale of the Sankgreal (Four Courts Press, 2000)
Edited books
- With Alan J. Fletcher, Studies in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Texts in Honour of John Scattergood: ‘The Key of All Good Remembrance’ (Four Courts Press, 2005)
- With Helen Conrad O’Briain and John Scattergood, Text and Gloss: Studies in Insular Learning and Literature: Essays Presented to Joseph Donovan Pheifer (Four Courts Press, 1999)
Journal articles
- 'Columban Texts and Joyce’s ‘book of kills’ (FW 482.33): A Palaeographer’s View in Finnegans Wake', European Joyce Studies 28 (2020): 181-96.
- ‘Haggiography in duotrigesumy’ (FW 324.12): Saints, Sages and the Thirty-first International Eucharistic Congress, 21-26 June 1932’, Dublin James Joyce Journal 10 (2017-18): 44-64
- ‘Ecclesia, Anima and Spiritual Priesthood in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum’, Review of English Studies 66 (2015): 634-654
- ‘Piercing the Veil: Der reine Tor, the Grail Quest, and the Language Question in “Araby”’, Dublin James Joyce Journal 6/7 (2013/14): 20-43
- ‘Dindsenchas, Mr Deasy and the Nightmare of Partition in Ulysses’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 114C (2014): 1-31
- ‘Joyce and the Twoheaded Octopus of judéo-maçonnerie’, Review of English Studies 64 (2013): 857-77
- ‘“Vartryville”: Dublin’s Water Supply and Joyce’s Sublation of Local Government’, Joyce Studies Annual (2013): 252-94
- ‘The Faerie King’s Kunstkammer: Imperial Discourse and the Wondrous in Sir Orfeo’, Review of English Studies 58 (2007): 10-33
- ‘Li Anemis Meismes’: Satan and Synagogue in La Queste del Saint Graal’, Medium Ævum 66 (1997): 207-35
Book chapters
- ‘Those Jews they said killed the Christian boy’ (U 6.771-2): The Shadow of Kishinev in Ulysses', in Reimagining the Jews of Ireland: Historiography, Identity and Representation, ed. Zulieka Rogers and Natalie Wynn (Peter Lang, 2020) (forthcoming).
- ‘Mariology, Rhetorical Decorum, and the Material Culture of Aureate Diction’, Middle English Lyrics: New Readings of Short Poems, ed. Julia Boffey and Christiania Whitehead (Boydell and Brewer, 2018): 109-21.
- ‘“Eating orangepeels in the park”: Largesse, Libel and Public Action in Ulysses’, in Joyce and the Law, ed. Jonathan Goldman (University of Florida Press, 2017): 157-78
- ‘Joyce’s Saints and Sages: History, Hagiology, and the Irish Franciscan Tradition,’ in Anne Marie D’Arcy, John McCafferty, Marina Ansaldo and Jason McElligot, James Joyce: Apocalypse and Exile (Marsh’s Library, 2014): 11-17
- ‘Joachim of Fiore and “Joachitism” from Stephen Hero to Finnegans Wake’, in Anne Marie D’Arcy, John McCafferty, Marina Ansaldo and Jason McElligot, James Joyce: Apocalypse and Exile (Marsh’s Library, 2014): 18-26
- ‘Joyce and the Trecento’, in Anne Marie D’Arcy, John McCafferty, Marina Ansaldo and Jason McElligot, James Joyce: Apocalypse and Exile (Marsh’s Library, 2014): 27-30
- ‘“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 (Four Courts Press, 2005): 100-20
- ‘The Middle English Lyric’, in Interpreting Medieval Literature: Readings of Old and Middle English Texts, ed. David F. Johnson and Elaine Treharne (Oxford University Press, 2004): 306-22
- ‘“Cursed folk of Herodes al new”: Supersessionist Typology and Chaucer’s Prioress’, in Writing Gender and Genre in Medieval Literature: Approaches to Old and Middle English Texts, ed. Elaine Treharne (Boydell and Brewer, 2002): 117-36
- ‘Holy Vessell and Blyssed Bloode: Malory’s Personal Symbolism of the Grail’, in Middle English from Tongue to Text, ed. Peter J. Lucas and Angela M. Lucas (Peter Lang, 2002): 93-318
Selected reviews
- Review of Leah Tether, Publishing the Grail in Medieval and Renaissance France (Brewer, 2017) in Modern Language Review 114 (2019) (forthcoming)
- Review of Thorlac Turville-Petre, ed. Poems from BL MS Harley 913: ‘The Kildare Manuscript’, EETS os 345 (Oxford University Press, 2015) in Review of English Studies 67 (2016)
- Review of Craig M. Rustici, The Afterlife of Pope Joan: Deploying the Popess Legend in Early Modern England (University of Michigan Press, 2006) in Bulletin for the Society for Renaissance Studies 28 (2011): 49-52
- Review of Thomas G. Duncan, ed. A Companion to the Middle English Lyric (D. S. Brewer, 2005) in Review of English Studies 58 (2007): 394-7
- With Jill Frederick and Mary Swan, ‘Old English Literature’, in The Year’s Work in English Studies 81 (2002 for 2000):132-70
- ‘No notion is too audacious’. Review of Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum, trans. William Weaver (Secker and Warburg, 1989) in The Irish Independent (Saturday, 10 February 1990): 18
Internet publications
‘England in the Time of King Richard III’ (MOOC): https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/england-of-richard-third
- ‘High Status Books’
- ‘High Status Books II: Richard III's library’
- ‘The Use of Words in Other Media’
- ‘The Use of Words in Other Media II: Religious Text’
- ‘Caxton and the First English Printed Books’
- ‘The Spread of Early Books and Survival of Manuscripts’
- ‘Caxton, Woodville and Revenge’
- ‘A Tale of Two Eggs’
- ‘The Rise of Published English’
'Saint-Denis and Notre-Dame: Royal Abbey and Civic Cathedral', Irish Humanities Alliance (Royal Irish Academy) (Blog):
https://www.irishhumanities.com/blog/royal-abbey-and-civic-cathedral-saint-denis-and-notre-dame/
Visit Future Learn for further details
Research
My monograph, Wisdom and the Grail: The Image of the Vessel in the Queste del Saint Graal and Malory’s Tale of the Sankgreal (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. Cf. John Crace, 'Anne Marie D'Arcy: The Da Vinci Code-Breaker', Education Guardian Higher Profile: The Guardian, 23 May 2006.
I have 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 (Four Courts Press, 1999), and Studies in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Texts in Honour of John Scattergood: ‘The Key of All Good Remembrance’ (Four Courts Press, 2005).
I am currently completing a substantial monograph, Joyce and the Irish Middle Ages: Saints, Sages and the Insular Imagination (Routledge, 2021) 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.
I am also working on another monograph, The Artifice of Eternity: Mariology in the English Poetic Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2022) 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.
Grants and funding
- REF-Research Impact Development Fund, University of Leicester, 'Capturing, Developing and Extending the Impact of James Joyce, Apocalypse and Exile’, £3,303, University of Leicester, 11 November 2019
- REF-Research Impact Development Fund, University of Leicester, ‘Capturing, Developing and Extending the Impact of James Joyce, Apocalypse and Exile’: £5,845, University of Leicester, 17 July 2017
- Trinity College Dublin Association and Trust, Grant in Aid of Publication for The Key of All Good Remembrance (Dublin, 2005): €2,500, University of Dublin, 2 May 2000
- National University of Ireland, Grant in Aid of Publication for Wisdom and the Grail (Dublin, 2000): IR£2,000, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, 29 June 2000
Teaching
I teach on the following undergraduate modules:
- EN2010 Chaucer and the English Tradition (Lecturer and Tutor)
- EN2030 Old English (Lecturer)
- EN2040 Medieval Literatures (Lecturer and Tutor)
- EN3010 Compulsory Dissertation (Supervisor)
- EN3124 Woman and the Feminine in Medieval and Renaissance Literatur (Lecturer)
- EN3115 Church and State in Medieval Literature (Lecturer)
I also teach on the following postgraduate courses:
- MA in English Studies / MA in Humanities: Dissertation Supervisor and Course Convenor of EN7224: 'Cities of Words', teaching classical and biblical sources, Sir Orfeo, Pearl, Langland's Piers Plowman and James Joyce's Ulysses.
- MA in History / MA in Humanities: I contribute to the core medieval module: Mastering Medieval Sources (convenor: Dr Joanna Story) teaching patristics, exegesis and canonicity
- Postgraduate Certificate in Medical Humanities, teaching Scriptural Exegesis and Disease
I have received the following awards for my teaching:
- University of Leicester Students’ Union ‘I Love my Academic’ Award (2010-11; 2011-12; 2012-13)
- University of Leicester Students’ Union ‘Academic Superstar’ Award (2015-16; 2016-17)
Supervision
I would welcome the opportunity to supervise topics in the following areas: