Dr Helen Cooney B.A., M.A. (Bristol), Ph.D. (Dublin).
Research and teaching interests:
Research and Teaching Interests
Chaucer (both the courtly works and the Canterbury Tales); the fifteenth-century ‘Chaucerians’; the works of the ‘Gawain-poet’; Spenser’s Faerie Queene; Sidney’s Arcadia. Medieval and Renaissance ethics and aesthetics; the history of ideas, as these underlie the works of poets, both as they exemplify and subvert philosophical and theological orthodoxies. Currently at work on a study of courtly allegories, from Lydgate’s Temple of Glas to Gavin Douglas’ Palice of Honour; focusing on how these poems are a response to Chaucer (very often a sharply corrective one); and on how they provide a lens through which one may trace the advent of both Renaissance and Reformation in England and Scotland. Eccentric poetic forms and constructs (e.g. the ’retrospective’ prologue; the palimpsest; the “cento”).
I currently teach on the M.Phil. in Medieval Language, Literature and Culture, with special reference to medieval poetics; Chaucer; 15th-century courtly poetry. I have supervised research (at doctoral level) on Chaucer; medieval literary theory; scholastic views of poetry; religious perspectives in Chaucer and; and M.Phil. dissertations on a variety of subjects, including: Chaucer’s dream-visions; Arthurian Romance, in Old French and medieval English from 12th-15th century.
Books:
Chaucer’s Theodicies of Love: Attempts to Justify the Ways of God (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, forthcoming 2011)
Into the Renaissance: English and Scottish Allegories, 1410-1520, (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2011/12)
ed. Writings on Love in the English Middle Ages (Palgrave, 2006)
ed. Nation, Court and Culture: New Essays on Fifteenth-Century English Poetry (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001)
Selected Essays:
“The Enigma of the” Fyve Fyngers” of the Pentangle in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Classical Source”, (Medium Aevum) [forthcoming, 2011)
“The Origin and Meaning of Chaucer’s Temples of Glass (Medium Aevum) [forthcoming, 2011]
A Likely Story: The Exceedingly Odd Preface to the 1614 edition of Spenser’s Faerie Queene”, Long Room (forthcoming, 2011) [with Mark Sweetnam]“
Introduction, Writings on Love in the English Middle Ages (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 1-6
“Some New Thing: ‘The Floure and the Leafe and the Cultural Shift in the Role of the Poet in Fifteenth-Century England”, Writings on Love, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2006; as above), pp. 131-146
Introduction, in Cooney (ed.), Nation, Court and Culture (Dublin: Four Courts Press 201), pp. 1-16
“Skelton’s Bowge of Court and the Crisis of Allegory in Late-Medieval England”, in Cooney (ed.), Nation, Court and Culture (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), pp. 225-43
“Guyon and his Palmer: Spenser’s Emblem of Temperance”, Review of English Studies, N.S. Vol. 51, No. 202 (2000), 169-192
‘Wonder and Immanent Justice in The Man of Law’s Tale”, The Chaucer Review, Vol, 33, No.3 (1999), 264-287
“The Parlement of Foules: a Theodicy of Love”, The Chaucer Review. Vol. 32, No.4 (1998), 339-376
Review Article:
‘”Sense-Clearing”: Seamus Heaney’s translation of Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid and some Fables”, Poetry Ireland Review (2009)
Contact:
hmcooney@tcd.ie