Dr Cathy Hume

My main current research project is on biblical poetry in Middle English. I have been awarded an AHRC RDE fellowship ‘Rewriting the Bible: Medieval Poems and Modern Audiences’, which runs from spring 2024 to autumn 2025.  This fellowship will allow me to edit an anthology of ten biblical poems for TEAMS Middle English Texts, and stage a performance of one poem, ‘The Life of Job’, at Winterbourne Medieval Barn in June 2025, with a creative team. 

My study of 6 biblical poems, including the Gawain­­-poet’s Patience and Cleanness, Middle English Biblical Poetry: Romance, Audience and Tradition was published in 2021 by Boydell and Brewer.  I have also published a few articles on this subject, including one in New Medieval Literatures 18 on ‘The Life of Job’.  I am at an early stage of collaborative work with Alaric Hall at Leeds University on an Islamic Joseph poem; I will also be publishing some research on how popular biblical poetry influenced Piers Plowman.

My PhD investigated Chaucer's presentation of love and marriage relationships in relation to their social historical context, approached through letter collections and advice literature. It was published as Chaucer and the Cultures of Love and Marriage, Bristol Studies in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012).  I continue to be broadly interested in the literature of medieval Britain and its social and cultural contexts.

I am also interested in the cognitive aspects of how readers make sense of narratives.  I gave a presentation to Malory 550 conference in August 2019 on how this might be a fruitful approach to Malory’s Morte, now published in Arthurian Literature, and plan to do more work in this area.  Another current interest is the medieval cultural history of the Somerset levels, especially in relation to King Alfred.

At Bristol I am an active member of the Centre for Medieval Studies.