Bardic Grammars as Windows into Late Medieval and Early Modern Wales

Michaela Jacques will discuss the compilation, transmission, and reception of Welsh bardic grammars, vernacular treatises that present information about the Welsh language and rules for the composition of strict-metre poetry. She will trace the variety of ways in which these documents were put to use between the fourteenth century and the end of the sixteenth, and what this may reveal to us about how Welsh bardic, scholarly, and bureaucratic practices developed during a period of intense social and political change.

Michaela Jacques completed her PhD in Celtic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University after earning her BA as a Celtic Studies specialist at the University of Toronto. She returned to the University of Toronto to take up a postdoctoral fellowship at the Centre for Medieval Studies in 2020-2022. She now works as an editor at McGill-Queen’s University Press.