Assistant Professor 

Email: bbarootes@mun.ca  

Office: AS 332-E

 

Research Interests/Expertise

• Middle English literature
• Geoffrey Chaucer and the Chaucerian tradition
• the Pearl-poet and the works of the Cotton Nero A.x manuscript
• dream vision literature
• philology and the history of the English language
• late-medieval devotional practice and culture
• medieval romance (including Arthuriana)
• book history and print culture
• R.R. Tolkien and modern medievalisms

 

Teaching

Since I arrived at Grenfell in 2021, I have added a number of new courses to the English programme’s offerings, including ENGL 2600: Intro to Middle English, ENGL 3600: Chaucer, ENGL 4601: Medieval Romance, and ENGL 4701: Literature and Devotion in the Middle Ages. I look forward to deepening and increasing the programme’s medieval literature offerings in the coming years. 

Every autumn, I teach the first literary survey, ENGL 2005, which covers English literature from its surviving origins (c. 700) to the end of the early modern period (c. 1700). We deal with major texts such as Beowulf (c. 1000), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1390), and a little bit of Paradise Lost (1674), but we also address short, lyrical poems, fairy-tale romances, and at least one somewhat lewd tale. As a philologist, I am delighted to teach the Honours-required course, History of the English Language (ENGL 3395), which is offered at least every two years; this course examines the whole story of English, from its pre-history in the proto-Indo-European deep past to its time as a nascent branch of the Germanic language family, the different dialects as regionalisms as they developed in the British Isles in throughout the Middle Ages, and the spread of English across the globe, for better and worse, in the early modern and modern centuries.

Like all members of the English programme, I teach first-year English courses. Given my training and expertise, I tend to focus on poetry and drama, but I’m not adverse to short stories and novels. (In this last case, we have, for instance, covered True Grit, which is a western, and The Grimmer, a YA horrow novel that deals with friendships, addiction, and racism, alongside magic and ancient ghouls.) In my courses, we concentrate on close reading, thematic identifications, and argument construction. I also aim to work with my students on the important elements of English grammar and building their confidence as writers.

 

Research

I am a medievalist by training, which means that my work is inherently interdisciplinary: I chiefly deal with literature, but I also frequently work with the physical vehicles of that literature, viz., the medieval manuscripts that preserve the texts, as well as historical documents, medieval books used for religious service or personal devotion, and other cultural artefacts. I am also deeply invested in the vernacular language of the period.

My doctoral work dealt with Middle English dream vision poetry, and I have published on each of the three poems featured in my dissertation: Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, the anonymous, West Midlands Pearl, and Charles d’Orleans’s Fortunes Stabilnes. I have also taught these poems in various 2000-, 3000-, and 4000-level courses. 

Over the course of two postdoctoral fellowships, the first at the Univeristy of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies and the second at the Pontifical Institute of Mediæval Studies, I broadened my scope of research to investigate the intersections of devotional practices and literary cultures in late-medieval England. I started this course of study with an interest in the cult of the Holy Name of Jesus, which led me to the mass book belonging to Sir William Beauchamp, first baron Bergavenny (c. 1343–1411), a nobleman initially trained for the priesthood, a one-time crusader, and a friend of Chaucer. I have since become interested in the parallel devotion to the Five Wounds of Christ as well as aristocratic and gentry promotion of vernacular religious practice.

In the late spring of 2025, I will spend a month at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library as a Sassoon Fellow where I will be working with copies of the Early Version of the Wycliffite Bible and Sir John Clanvowe’s The Two Ways. This investigation is part of my new project tentatively titled “‘O Jankin, be ye there?’: The Faith and Devotional Practices of the Chaucer Circle.”

 

Publications

Journal Articles and Notes (peer-reviewed)

“On the Marriage of William Beauchamp and Joan FitzAlan: Some New Information.” Medium Ævum 93.1 (2024): 162‒74. [approx. 6755 words]

 

“On the Lost Years of William Beauchamp, first Baron Bergavenny (c. 1343–1411): Some Overlooked Life-Records.” Florilegium 37 (2020 [pub. 2024; submitted 2022]): 79–94. [approx. 8855 words]

 

“A Note Clarifying the Date of the Last Will and Testament of Richard FitzAlan, earl of Arundel (d. 1397).” Notes & Queries 69.1 (2022): 13–15. [approx. 1445 words]

 

“‘In fourme of speche is chaunge’: Final –e in Troilus and Criseyde II.22–28.” The Chaucer Review 53.1 (2018): 102–11. [approx. 7240 words]

 

“Your eigning hert: A Hapax Legomenon in Cursor Mundi, line 28339.” Neophilologus 102.2 (2018): 279–84. [approx. 2325 words]

 

“Number Symbolism in Pearl: Lines 720–21.” Studia Neophilologica 89.1 (2017): 34–40 [approx. 3450 words]

 

‘“O perle’: Apostrophe in Pearl.” Studies in Philology 113.4 (2016): 739–64. [approx. 8105 words]

 

“Whence the buf? Chaucer’s Philological Burp.” Neophilologus 98.3 (2014): 495–501. [approx. 3275 words]

 

Book Chapters (peer-reviewed)

“A Grieving Lover: The Work of Mourning in Charles’s First Ballade Sequence.” In Charles d’Orléans’s English Aesthetic: The Form, Poetics, and Style of “Fortunes Stabilnes”, edited by R.D. Perry and Mary-Jo Arn, 102–21. D.S. Brewer, 2020. [approx. 9980 words]

 

“Idleness, Chess, and Tables: Recuperating Fables in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess.” In Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess: Context and Interpretations, edited by Jamie C. Fumo, 29–50. D.S. Brewer, 2018. [approx. 10570 words]

 

“‘He chanted a song of wizardry’: Words with Power in Middle-earth.” In Tolkien in the New Century: Essays in Honor of Tom Shippey, edited by John Wm. Houghton et al., 115–31. McFarland, 2014. [approx. 9255 words]

 

“Nobody’s Meat: Freedom through Monstrosity in Contemporary British Fiction.” Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil, edited by Niall W.R. Scott, 187–200. Rodopi, 2007. [approx. 5105 words]

 

Other publications (all by invitation)

“Review: Approaches to Teaching the Middle English Pearl, edited by Jane Beal and Mark Bradshaw Busbee (MLA, 2017).” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 120.2 (2021): 249–52.

 

“Review: The Signifying Power of Pearl: Medieval Literary and Cultural Contexts for the Transformation of Genre, by Jane Beal (Routledge, 2017).” Speculum 94.2 (2019): 500–2.

 

“Elegy.” In The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Medieval British Literature, edited by Siân Echard and Robert Rouse, 735–41. Wiley-Blackwell, 2017.

 

Interactions of Script and Print in the Nineteenth Century: A Digital Exhibition. Co-curated with Tom Mole. Interacting with Print Research Group and McGill University Library, 2010.

 

Select Awards, Fellowships, and Grants

2024‒2025      Sassoon Fellowship, Bodleian Library (University of Oxford)

 

2024                Grenfell Campus Research Fund (Memorial University of Newfoundland)     

                

2023                SSHRC Exchange Travel Grant (Memorial University of Newfoundland) 

 

2022                Grenfell Campus Research Fund (Memorial University of Newfoundland)    

                   

2022                Extra Resources Grant, Centre for the Arts in Society (Leiden University)   

                                                         

2019–20          Postdoctoral Fellowship, Canadian Institute for Health Research (University of Regina)

 

2018–19          Postdoctoral Fellowship, Mellon Foundation (Pontifical Institute of Mediæval Studies)  

                                                 

2018–19          Visiting Professor Fellowship, Harrison McCain Foundation (Acadia University)                  

                              

2017                Research Bursary, Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature

     

2016–18          Postdoctoral Fellowship, SSHRC (Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto)         

 

Previously Taught at

Leiden University (The Netherlands), Brock University (St Catharines, ON), Wilfrid Laurier University (Brantford, ON), McGill University (Montreal, QC), and Luther College, University of Regina (Regina, SK)