Books by Simone Celine Marshall
The Assembly of Ladies is a fifteenth-century English poem that has remained in print for over 50... more The Assembly of Ladies is a fifteenth-century English poem that has remained in print for over 500 years. Its longevity, however, has not been due to its quality, but rather its anonymity. Without a named author, the poem has been available for scribes and editors to appropriate and include in anthologies. A reception history of this poem demonstrates how societies use literature to reflect the social and political concerns of the day, the arbitrary nature of canon formation, and the emphasis societies place on the authority of the author.
The Assembly of Ladies is a fifteenth-century secular love poem in Middle English that adheres cl... more The Assembly of Ladies is a fifteenth-century secular love poem in Middle English that adheres closely to conventional poetic structures, but throws these conventions into relief as it presents the narrative from a womans point of view, a rare occurrence for poetry of this period. Who wrote it, for whom and why, are questions about which we can speculate, but never ultimately answerthe poem itself gives us few clues. Yet the poem has had a remarkable shelf-life; in subsequent centuries the poem has continued to be noticed, read, and debated, as a small but significant artefact from fifteenth-century England. This book examines how fifteenth-century English social conventions impact upon gender relations in The Assembly of Ladies. By drawing on contemporary (and clearly influential) texts from the fifteenth century as a comparison, Marshall shows how The Assembly of Ladies has integrated social conventions into its themes and structure, elevating for the reader the ways that social and literary conventions impact on women in the production and consumption of literature.
Papers by Simone Celine Marshall
From Medievalism to Early-Modernism, 2018
International Journal of Education and Development using ICT, 2007
The development of Engagement Theory for technology-based teaching and learning provides guidelin... more The development of Engagement Theory for technology-based teaching and learning provides guidelines specifically for Information and Communication Technology (ICT). This article is drawn from a case study in which a popular learning management system, WebCT, is used in an academic writing course at the University of Sydney, Australia. The study highlights both the benefits and difficulties of using technology when teaching academic writing, and shows how effective Engagement Theory has been in the design, implementation, and outcomes of the website associated with the course. The website enhances the teaching and learning experiences of the students and the lecturer, students participate actively in the unit, interact and collaborate with each other and with the lecturer, and do so within a safe environment. The students also work together on projects that are meaningful and which are directly relevant to their own disciplines. Significantly, the time associated with the development...
The Assembly of Ladies is an anonymous poem in Middle English that exists in three manuscripts da... more The Assembly of Ladies is an anonymous poem in Middle English that exists in three manuscripts dating from the fifteenth century: Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.19; Warminster, Longleat MS 258; and London, British Library, Additional MS 34360. (1) The poem is of scholarly interest because, among other features, it has remained in literary canons for largely spurious reasons: the manuscripts containing the poem were preserved not because they contained The Assembly of Ladies but because they contained other works (by Chaucer and Lydgate) deemed to be of literary merit. Likewise, early print editions preserve the poem because it was widely attributed to Chaucer. (2) Later editions and scholarship aligned the poem with another fifteenth-century poem, The Floure and the Leafe, and valued them as examples of women's writing. Walter Skeat famously stated that The Assembly of Ladies and The Floure and the Leafe must have been authored by the same woman because surely there could not...
Mester, 2017
The articles presented here attest to how the field of medieval studies is continually evolving, ... more The articles presented here attest to how the field of medieval studies is continually evolving, in particular encompassing how the medieval interrelates with the modern world. We see this development in multiple ways in these articles, which is an important feature: there is no single 'right' direction for medieval studies, but rather a plethora of possible avenues that intertwine and connect. This commonality-in-diversity is a feature to embrace and will no doubt ensure the continued success of the field in scholarly circles, and, one hopes, with the wider public. Humanities research remains something of an unknown enterprise to many in the public, due, in some part, to limited media interest. There are pockets of success: law, politics, and sociology specialists are frequently called upon to offer expert opinions on contemporary concerns. Less so, specialists in medieval studies. The effort to explain to the wider world how medieval studies remains a relevant and vital part of research ought to be one of the goals of all researchers in the field. After all, we ourselves are able to instantly comprehend the relevance, and so it behoves us to explain this to others. Persuading mainstream media organisations that we have something to offer the public will remain an uphill battle, but not an insurmountable one. Research such as that presented in this issue of Literature & Aesthetics goes some way to contributing to the ongoing endeavour of bringing the medieval past to light. In this issue of Literature & Aesthetics, our authors examine how the past remains a significant cultural influence on our present, and that to ignore this connection results in cultural illiteracy. As Albrecht Classen notes, "sometimes the most popular or important texts from the past are simply unknown to most of us today," and we are the worse for this. Understanding the process by which our cultural identity is shaped and created ultimately leads to a better society. In the first article in this issue Simone Celine Marshall offers a comparison between Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse and the mystical writings of the sixth-century philosopher Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, because such a comparison brings to the fore the need to acknowledge the human spiritual condition as part of social identity. Recognising that writers many centuries apart grappled with the same concerns and problems about the human condition acknowledges how important this is to the nature of humanity.
The Assembly of Ladies is an anonymous fifteenth-century secular love poem. (1) It adheres closel... more The Assembly of Ladies is an anonymous fifteenth-century secular love poem. (1) It adheres closely to conventional poetic structures but throws these conventions into relief as it presents its narrative from a woman's point of view, a rare occurrence for poetry of this period. (2) The immediate effect of a female narrator is to draw attention to the way gender is presented within the poem, and subsequently gender becomes a defining issue throughout the poem. (3) While gender is elevated as a feature of the poem by a number of different methods, here in this article the focus will be on one of those methods: the way the poem uses gendered space to convey meaning. Both the text and the narrative present the reader with geographical locations, which are specifically gendered to cause the reader to draw a correlation between the literary and social conventions that govern the poem. The result of this correlation indicates that, as the narrator is marginalized from the geographic loc...
Introduction Much scholarship has considered the mystical content of Virginia Woolf’s writings. F... more Introduction Much scholarship has considered the mystical content of Virginia Woolf’s writings. From the ethereal and other-worldly elements of her novels, to the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Transcendentalism, to a correlation with the works of Plotinus, are among the many sources considered. Indeed Woolf’s writings do suggest that she was at times contemplating a kind of mysticism. She uses the word, mysticism, on many occasions, in fiction and non-fiction situations, as well as many of the other tropes familiar to mysticism, such as references to vision and light. This article is positioned carefully as a contribution to scholarship on Woolf’s mysticism, not intending to reject the work of others, but rather to contribute another facet to the argument. The focus here is on the works of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the sixth-century Syrian theologian and philosopher, and uses as a springboard the critical analysis of Charles M. Stang. Stang presents an innovative and t...
Contents: Scribal Interpretation - The recovery of English - Rejection from the Chaucer canon - W... more Contents: Scribal Interpretation - The recovery of English - Rejection from the Chaucer canon - Women's literature - Anonymity and canonicity.
The Medieval Presence in the Modernist Aesthetic
In The Medieval Presence in the Modernist Aesthetic: Unattended Moments, editors Simone Celine Ma... more In The Medieval Presence in the Modernist Aesthetic: Unattended Moments, editors Simone Celine Marshall and Carole M. Cusack have assembled a collection of studies on Modernist authors that are original, thought-provoking and often delightful.
Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840
Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation
The 124-volume edition of The Poets of Great Britain, containing The Poetical Works of Geoffrey C... more The 124-volume edition of The Poets of Great Britain, containing The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, came into being when, in 1807, a group of thirty-three London booksellers began publication of a work that claims, from its title page, to be a reprint of John Bell’s 1782 series The Poets of Great Britain. The reality, however, is somewhat different. In fact the works of Chaucer have been markedly revised and re-edited, a feature that until now had not been noted by scholars.The following article is a textual analysis of some of the most striking features to have emerged from an analysis of the 1807 edition of The Book of the Duchess, as compared with its predecessors. The Book of the Duchess has been chosen as a sample text for this consideration, primarily because it is of sufficient scope to offer, on the one hand, a substantial enough sample from which to draw conclusions, and, on the other hand, limited enough to be manageable. In addition to these particular reasons, The B...
Philological Quarterly, Mar 22, 2005
Journal of Religious History, 2008
Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation
The 124-volume edition of The Poets of Great Britain, containing The Poetical Works of Geoffrey C... more The 124-volume edition of The Poets of Great Britain, containing The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, came into being when, in 1807, a group of thirty-three London booksellers began publication of a work that claims, from its title page, to be a reprint of John Bell’s 1782 series The Poets of Great Britain. The reality, however, is somewhat different. In fact the works of Chaucer have been markedly revised and re-edited, a feature that until now had not been noted by scholars.The following article is a textual analysis of some of the most striking features to have emerged from an analysis of the 1807 edition of The Book of the Duchess, as compared with its predecessors. The Book of the Duchess has been chosen as a sample text for this consideration, primarily because it is of sufficient scope to offer, on the one hand, a substantial enough sample from which to draw conclusions, and, on the other hand, limited enough to be manageable. In addition to these particular reasons, The B...
The development of Engagement Theory for technology-based teaching and learning provides guidelin... more The development of Engagement Theory for technology-based teaching and learning provides guidelines specifically for Information and Communication Technology (ICT). This article is drawn from a case study in which a popular learning management system, WebCT, is used in an academic writing course at the University of Sydney, Australia. The study highlights both the benefits and difficulties of using technology when
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Books by Simone Celine Marshall
Papers by Simone Celine Marshall