Centenary Professor of French

Arts One
Room: 2.09a
Tel: +44 20 7882 8316
Fax: +44 20 8980 5400
Email: a.armstrong@qmul.ac.uk

Office hours:
Semester 1 Tue 12-1, Wed 11-12
Semester 2 Tue 10-11, Thu 12-1

Areas of specialisation

I work primarily on late medieval French literature, particularly Grand Rhétoriqueur poetry and the role of book form (manuscripts, early printing, text-image relations, etc). My most recent major project was a collaborative enterprise, ‘Poetic Knowledge in Late Medieval France’, funded by the AHRC between 2005 and 2009. More generally, I have methodological interests in book history and visual culture, and in a range of theoretical approaches to texts and cultures, notably reception theory, feminist philosophy, and narratology. I have supervised PhD students in literary studies (often with a comparative dimension), translation studies, art history, and book history.

Current research projects

I am working on a Companion to François Villon (commissioned by Boydell and Brewer), and in 2012-15 am the Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded project 'Transcultural Critical Editing: Vernacular Poetry in the Burgundian Netherlands, 1450-1530'. My contribution to this project will include two volumes of a three-volume critical edition of Jean Molinet’s poetry (contracted to Classiques Garnier), and an exhibition to be held in Manchester in 2014.

Publications

Authored books and critical editions

• The Virtuoso Circle: Competition, Collaboration and Complexity in Late Medieval French Poetry (Tempe AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies; in press)
• Knowing Poetry: Verse in Medieval France from the Rose to the Rhétoriqueurs, co-authored with Sarah Kay, with the participation of Rebecca Dixon, Miranda Griffin, Sylvia Huot, Francesca Nicholson and Finn Sinclair (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011)
• Jean Bouchet, Œuvres complètes I : Le Jugement poetic de l’honneur femenin, critical edition (Paris: Champion, 2006)
• Jean Lemaire de Belges, ‘Epistre du roy à Hector’ et autres pièces de circonstances (1511-1513) / Jean d’Auton, ‘Epistre d’Hector au roy’, critical edition co-edited with Jennifer Britnell (Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 2000)
• Technique and Technology: Script, Print, and Poetics in France, 1470-1550 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)

Edited books

• Poetry, Knowledge and Community in Late Medieval France, edited by Rebecca Dixon and Finn E. Sinclair, with the participation of Adrian Armstrong, Sylvia Huot, and Sarah Kay (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2008)
• Book and Text in France, 1400-1600: Poetry on the Page, co-edited with Malcolm Quainton (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)
• Print and Power in France and England, 1500-1800, co-edited with David Adams (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006)
• ‘Text and Image: Studies in the French Illustrated Book from the Middle Ages to the Present Day’, vol. 81/3 (1999) of the Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, co-edited with David Adams

Articles and book chapters

• ‘Alain Chartier and the Rhétoriqueurs’, in A Companion to Alain Chartier, ed. Daisy Delogu, Emma Cayley, and Joan E. McRae (Leiden: Brill; in press)
• ‘Le manuscrit Phillipps 3644: un recueil poétique inconnu de la fin du Moyen Âge’, Scriptorium, 65 (2011), 352-84 (in press)
• 'Introduction', in Incunabula: The Printing Revolution in Europe 1455-1500; A Guide to Units 65, 66 and 70 of the Microfiche Collection, Printing in French Parts I-III (Andover/Woodbridge CT: Cengage Learning, 2011), 13-43
• ‘Vers, prose, technologie: ponctuer L’Art de rhétorique de Jean Molinet, du manuscrit à l'imprimé’, in La Ponctuation à la Renaissance, ed. Nathalie Dauvois and Jacques Dürrenmatt (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2011), 57-70
• ‘Boire chez (et avec) Molinet’, in Jean Molinet et son temps, ed. Jean Devaux, Estelle Doudet and Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin (Turnhout: Brepols; in press)
• ‘The Emblematic Afterlife of Jean Bouchet: Piracy, Layout, Interpolation’, in Le livre demeure: Studies in Book History in Honour of Alison Saunders, ed. Alison Adams and Philip Ford (Geneva: Droz, 2011), 15-36
• ‘Printing and Metrical Naturalisation: Jean Molinet’s Neuf Preux de Gourmandise’, in Essays in Late Medieval French Literature: The Legacy of Jane Taylor, ed. Rebecca Dixon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 143-59
• ‘The Shaping of Knowledge in an Anthology of Jean Molinet’s Poetry: Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College 187:220’, Revue d’histoire des textes, nouvelle série, 4 (2009), 215-75
• ‘Yearning and Learning: Spaces of Desire in Jean Lemaire de Belges’s Concorde des deux langages (1511)’, in The Erotics of Consolation: Desire and Distance in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Catherine E. Léglu and Stephen J. Milner (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 79-94
• ‘Poitiers to Paris: Hélisenne de Crenne rewrites Jean Bouchet’, in Writers in Conflict in Sixteenth-Century France: Studies in Honour of Malcolm Quainton, ed. David Foster and Elizabeth Vinestock (Durham: Durham Modern Languages Series, 2008), 345-62
• ‘The Testament of François Villon’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature, ed. Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay (Cambridge: CUP, 2008), 65-76
• ‘Is this an ex-parrot? The printed afterlife of Jean Lemaire de Belges’ Épîtres de l’Amant vert’, Journal de la Renaissance, 5 (2007), 323-36
• ‘Reception and interference: reading Jean Molinet’s rebus-poems’, Word and Image, 23 (2007), 335-46
• ‘De l’abstrait à l’abject: Sensualité dans les Triumphes de la noble et amoureuse dame de Jean Bouchet’, in Entremetteurs et entremetteuses dans la littérature française et francophone de l'Antiquité à nos jours, ed. Corinne Pierreville (Lyon: CEDIC, 2007), 153-61
• ‘Songe, vision, savoir: l’onirique et l’épistémique chez Molinet et Lemaire de Belges’, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 123 (2007), 50-68
• ‘Avatars d’un griffonnage à succès: L’Epitaphe du duc Philippe de Bourgogne de Jean Molinet’, Le Moyen Age, 113 (2007), 25-44
• ‘Love on the Page: Materiality and Literariness in Jean Bouchet’s Amoureux transi and its Avatars’, in Book and Text in France, 1400-1600: Poetry on the Page, ed. Adrian Armstrong and Malcolm Quainton (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 95-115
• ‘Introduction’, in Book and Text in France, 1-11
• ‘Cosmetic surgery on Gaul: the printed reception of Burgundian writing in France before 1550’, in Print and Power in France and England, 1500-1800, ed. Adrian Armstrong and David Adams (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 13-26
• ‘Introduction’, co-written with David Adams, in Print and Power in France and England, 1-11
• ‘The Manuscript Reception of Jean Molinet’s Trosne d’Honneur’, Medium Ævum, 74 (2005), 311-28
• ‘Prosimètre et savoir’, in Le Prosimètre à la Renaissance, ed. Nathalie Dauvois, Cahiers V. L. Saulnier 22 (Paris: Éditions Rue d’Ulm/Presses de l’École normale supérieure, 2005), 125-42
• ‘Semiramis in Grand Rhétoriqueur Writing’, in Schooling and Society: The Ordering and Reordering of Knowledge in the Western Middle Ages, ed. Alasdair A. MacDonald and Michael Twomey (Leuven: Peeters; 2004), 157-71
• ‘Les Femmes et la violence dans le Jugement poetic de l’honneur femenin (1538)’, in Jean Bouchet, traverseur des voies périlleuses (1476-1557): Actes du colloque de Poitiers (30-31 août 2001), ed. Jennifer Britnell and Nathalie Dauvois (Paris: Champion, 2003), 209-28
• ‘L’active et la passive: deux modèles de vertu féminine dans le Jugement poetic de l’honneur femenin de Jean Bouchet (1538)?’ in Female Saints and Sinners: Saintes et Mondaines (France 1450-1650), ed. Jennifer Britnell and Ann Moss (Durham: Durham Modern Languages Series, 2002), 179-95
• ‘Versification on the Page in Jean Molinet’s Art de Rhétorique: From Aesthetic to Utilitarian’, TEXT, 15 (2002), 121-39
• La Plainte du Désiré de Jean Lemaire de Belges: du manuscrit illustré aux marges de l’imprimé’, in L’Analisi linguistica e letteraria, 1-2 (anno VIII, 2000): Actes du IIème Colloque international sur la Littérature en Moyen Français (Milan, 8-10 mai 2000), ed. Sergio Cigada, Anna Slerca, Giovanna Bellati, Monica Barsi, 139-56
• ‘Paratexte et autorité(s) chez les Grands Rhétoriqueurs’, in ‘L’Écrivain editeur, 1: Du Moyen Age à la fin du XVIIIe siecle’, Travaux de Littérature, XIV (2000), 61-89
• ‘Dead Man Walking: Remaniements and Recontextualisations of Jean Molinet’s Occasional Writing’, in Vernacular Literature and Current Affairs in the Early Sixteenth Century: France, England and Scotland, ed. Jennifer Britnell and Richard Britnell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 80-98
• ‘“Regardez bien tout au long les hystoires”: Illustration and Self-Conscious Writing in Jean Bouchet’s Jugement poetic de l’honneur femenin’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 81 (1999), 241-68
• ‘François Villon: Rhétoriqueur?’ in Villon in Oxford: The Drama of the Text, ed. Michael Freeman and Jane H.M. Taylor (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 51-84
• ‘Jean Marot’s Rebus-Rondeau: Sense and Space’, Le Moyen français, 42 (1998), 19-27
• ‘Pattern and Disruption in Formalist Poetry: The Example of Jean Molinet’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 98 (1997), 209-16
• ‘Two More Rebus-Poems by Jean Molinet?’ Scriptorium, 51 (1997), 76-80
• ‘The Practice of Textual Transmission: Jean Molinet’s Ressource du Petit Peuple’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 33 (1997), special volume: ‘The Practice of Medieval Literature’, 270-82
• ‘The Deferred Verdict: A Topos in Late-Medieval Poetic Debates?’ French Studies Bulletin, 64 (Autumn 1997), 12-14
• ‘Signing the Frame: The First Edition of Jean Bouchet’s Déploration de l’Église Militante’, Neophilologus, 79 (1995), 397-407
• ‘More Manuscript Copies of Jean Bouchet’s Verse: Mss. B.N. fr. 2206 and 2231’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 57 (1995), 89-99

Professional activities

• Membership Secretary, Association of University Professors and Heads of French (AUPHF)
• Editor of the monograph series Mittelalterliche Literatur über Grenzen (LIT Verlag, Berlin, Germany)
• Member of the Editorial Board of the Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester

Courses taught in 2011-12

• FRE468 French Foundations (visual studies component)
• FRE411 French I (grammar)
• FRE452 French III (F-E translation, commentaire)
• COM507 European Tragedy