Dr Hannah Bower 

I am a Teaching Fellow at Churchill specialising in late medieval literature. My research focuses on the boundaries, overlaps, and exchanges between literary writings and other practical, scientific, or magical texts.

My PhD explored linguistic and imaginative connections between medieval medical recipes and more canonical literature by writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and Julian of Norwich. It was completed at the University of Oxford in 2018 and funded by the Wellcome Trust; the book resulting from this research was published in 2022 by Oxford University Press as Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play, 1375-1500.

After my PhD, I completed a secondment fellowship at the London Science Museum investigating the circulation and reception of eighteenth-century medical pamphlets. In my current research, I continue to work across disciplines, genres and period boundaries: my current project, Representing Rupture in Medieval Domestic Literature, explores violent acts of fragmentation in a wide variety of literary, devotional, and practical writings connected to medieval and early modern households. My research suggests that, rather than simply being sensational or conventional, this violent imagery was a lively cognitive tool for thinking about the precarities and strengths of domestic relationships, as well as a means of expressing what domestic connection and disconnection felt like in the late Middle Ages.

At Churchill, I have taught the Part I papers English Literature and its Contexts, 1300—1550, English Literature and its Contexts, 1500-1700, and Shakespeare. When studying the medieval paper, we cover all kinds of texts—including medieval dream visions, story collections, chivalric romances, and drama—and all kinds of topics, including desire, queerness, travel, women’s writing, and ‘fan fiction’. Part II medieval optional papers on Chaucer and the Medieval Supernatural are equally thrilling, introducing you to the less-well known writings of Chaucer and the diverse miracles and marvels populating medieval manuscripts.