Bard Swallow

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. 

Publications

"Fifteenth-Century Middle English and Latin Additions to a New Manuscript of Mandeville’s Travels," Journal of the Early Book Society 27 (2024), 145-53  (in press).

"Common Authorship and the “Anonymous of Calais”: Reassessing an Anglo-Latin Political Poem from the Fourteenth Century", Journal of Medieval Latin 33 (2023), 89-118.  

“High Fantasy RPGs and the Materiality of the Medieval Book", Games and Culture (in press, published online November 19, 2023) 

Presentations

"The Middle English ‘O and I’ Refrain in Latin Verse.” New Chaucer Society, Pasadena, Calif., July 15-18, 2024.  

“Beginnings and Endings in Gower's Carmen super multiplici viciorum pestilencia.” 59^th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, May 9-11, 2024.

 “Translatio of the Untranslatable: Writing an English Verse form in Latin.” Convivium at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, March 15, 2024 (invited).

"Structural Use of Rhyme in the Viciorum Pestilencia." V International John Gower Society Congress, University of St. Andrews, July 7-10, 2023.

“‘a seipso effeminatur, sed infeminatur’: Gender Difference in Walter Map’s Tale of Rollo and His Wife.” 58th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, May 11-13, 2023.

“Scansion and Syntax in ‘Against the King’s Taxes’: vernacular adaptation to the Goliardic line.” Sewanee Medieval Colloquium, University of the South, March 24-25, 2023.