Over My Dead Body: Formula and Poetry in Late Medieval Manuscript

When choosing an inscription to place on a tomb, whether one's own or that of a loved one, what information is most important to include? Why choose to have the inscription be a poem? Why choose one language over another? Medieval poetry usually survives in manuscript form, but another significant source of poetry is tomb inscriptions. This paper will consider poems inscribed on tombs in late medieval England and the composition choices behind them, especially the choice of language. It will also discuss the relationship of these poems with formulas used in prose inscriptions and the differences between tomb poetry in England as opposed to France.

About the speaker

Bard Swallow (they/them) is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Medieval Studies with a collaborative specialization in Book History and Print Culture. Their dissertation studies the choices made by poets in the multilingual environment of fourteenth-century England: does choosing to write in Latin give poets access to poetic forms and formulas that have no English or French analogues? Bard’s research interests more broadly include manuscript anthologies and how compilers chose their contents, (multilingual) wordplay as used in poetry, and medievalism in modern media—especially video games. Their research has appeared in the Journal of Medieval Latin and Games and Culture and is forthcoming in the Journal of the Early Book Society.