Ardis Butterfield was educated at the University of Cambridge, where she received her MA and PhD. She also received an MA in Medieval English from Bristol. After a Research Fellowship at Downing College, Cambridge she was appointed to UCL. She held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2003-04 for ‘Chaucer and Nation’, a British Academy Exchange Fellowship at the Huntington Library (2007), and was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship from 2008-11 to research ‘The Origins of English Song’. Ardis is a founding member (from 2006) of the Advisory Council for the Institute of Musical Research (Senate House, University of London) and an Advisory Editor for the Early Book Society Monograph Series (Brepols). She gave the Biennial Lecture at the 16th International Congress of the New Chaucer Society in July 2008. She has supervised postgraduate research on such topics as the mediation of cultural and literary authority in Chaucerian dream poetry, vernacular literary prologues, reading Gower in manuscript, the discourses of belief in and surrounding Hoccleve’s Regement, new approaches to the medieval religious lyric, and a study of three fifteenth-century carol collections. She welcomes applications from prospective graduates on these and other areas related to her research.

Research

Ardis Butterfield’s research and publications cover three broad areas: Chaucer, the literatures of France and England from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, and medieval music. Her interests include medieval linguistic identities and multilingualism; nationhood; continental and insular vernacular manuscripts; city writing; and the medieval lyric. Her latest book, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War (2009), studies nationhood and the complexly intertwined linguistic and literary identities of English and French throughout the middle ages. It puts forward a different argument about ‘English’ and ‘Englishness’ from what has become the standard trajectory tracking the rise of vernacularity alongside the rise of the nation, most centrally through acknowledging that vernacular in England means French as well as English.

Currently she is writing a biography of Chaucer, Chaucer: A London Life (forthcoming with I.B. Tauris), editing a new collection of medieval English lyrics for Norton, and preparing an accompanying monograph that will take a cross-disciplinary view of the lyrics’ tri-lingual character (French and Latin as well as English), their remarkably broad-ranging cultural and manuscript contexts and, where it survives, their music. With Helen Deeming (Royal Holloway) she has recently co-founded the Medieval Song Network, a collaborative, international project to encourage new interdisciplinary research on the medieval lyric. The different strands of her research on Chaucer and medieval London and her editing work on the medieval lyric link to three of the department’s core research themes, The City, Life Stories, and Editions. She is particularly interested in exploring the cross-disciplinary and intermedial potential of song to suggest new ways of understanding how texts and melodies circulated through writing, memory and performance in the medieval period.

Selected Publications

Books

The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)

Poetry and Music in Medieval France from Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; paperback 2008)

Edited Book

Ed. with Introduction, Chaucer and the City (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006)

Chapters in Books and Articles

‘Nation and Vernacularity’, in Cultural Reformations: from Lollardy to the English Civil War, edited by Brian Cummings and James Simpson, Twenty-First Century Approaches, 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)

‘Guerre et paix: l’anglais, le français et "l’anglo-français"’, Journée d'études anglo-normandes, organisée par l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-lettres, Palais de l'Institut, 20 juin 2008: Actes, édités par André Crépin et Jean Leclant, Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-lettres (Paris: De Boccard, 2009), 7-23

‘Chaucerian Vernaculars’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 31 (2009), 25-51

'Music, Memory and Authenticity: Representing Sound in History', Representing History 1000-1300: Art, Music, History, ed. Robert Maxwell, Index of Christian Art (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009)

‘France’, in Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches, ed. Susanna Fein and David
Raybin (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, Sept 2009)

‘Converting Jeanne d’Arc: trahison and nation in the Hundred Years War’, New Medieval Literatures, 8 (2006), ed. Rita Copeland, Wendy Scase and David Lawton (Tournhout: Brepols, 2006), pp.67-97

‘English, French and Anglo-French: Language and nation in the fabliau', Special Issue of Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie: ‘Mittelalterliche Novellistik im europaïschen Kontext', ed. Mark Chinca, Timo Reuvekamp-Felber and Christopher Young (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2006), pp. 238-59

‘Le tradizioni della canzone cortese medievale’, in Enciclopedia della musica (The Einaudi Encyclopedia of Music), gen. ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez (Université de Montréal), with Margaret Bent (All Souls College, Oxford), Rossana Dalmonte (Università di Trento) and Mario Baroni (Università di Bologna), 4 vols, IV: Storia della musica europea (Turin: Einaudi, 2004), pp.130-51

'Confessio amantis and the French Tradition', Companion to Gower, ed. Siân Echard (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), pp.165-80

'The art of repetition: Machaut's Ballade 33 "Nes qu'on porroit"', Close Readings: Essays in Honour of John Stevens and Philip Brett, ed. Tess Knighton and John Milsom, Special Issue of Early Music, 31 (August 2003), 346-60

'Enté: A Survey and Re-Assessment of the Term in Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century Music and Poetry', Early Music History, ed. Iain Fenlon, 22 (2003), 67-101

'Articulating the Author: Gower and the French Vernacular Codex', The Yearbook of English Studies, Volume 33, Special Number: Medieval and Early Modern Miscellanies and Anthologies, ed. Phillipa Hardman (MHRA, 2003), pp. 80-96

'Chaucer's French Inheritance', The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, second edition, ed. Jill Mann and Piero Boitani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 20-35

'The Refrain and the Transformation of Genre in the Roman de Fauvel' and 'Appendix: Catalogue of Refrains in Le Roman de Fauvel, BN fr.146', Fauvel Studies: Allegory, Chronicle, Music and Image in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale MS français 146, ed. Margaret Bent and Andrew Wathey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp.105-59

'French Culture and the Ricardian Court', Essays on Ricardian Literature in Honour of J.A. Burrow, ed. Alistair Minnis, Charlotte C. Morse and Thorlac Turville-Petre (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp.82-121