Meet a Medievalist Maker: Mary Flannery
“Meet a Medievalist Maker” is an ongoing series of blog posts introducing our members and the work they are doing. Each post is organized around our Four P’s: a project they are working on (or have completed but want to highlight); their process: medium, etc; a peek at their work: images or excerpt; and a prompt: instructions for a brief exercise they share to allow readers to experience/explore their process. Would you like to write a post introducing yourself and your work? Send us an email!
My name is Mary Flannery and I’m what I like to think of as an “accidental medievalist.” I didn’t mean to end up studying the Middle Ages—it just sort of happened! The first job I dreamed of having as a kid was “detective.” The second job I dreamed of having was “writer.” I like to think that accidentally becoming a medievalist has enabled me to be a bit of both: it allows me to investigate things that fascinate me (like obscenity in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer!) and to write about what fascinates me for a wide variety of audiences. And while recently this has taken me deep into the world of comedy writing (a topic for another time), in this post I thought I’d focus on another kind of writing I’ve been doing for more than a decade: writing for the general public.
Process
In one form or another, I’ve been writing about medieval literature and culture for the general public since 2007. My first job after receiving my PhD was in the manuscripts department of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, where I assisted with various exhibitions (and even got to curate one of my very own). Drafting the accompanying labels for the exhibits required running multiple drafts by the museum’s communications people, who helped us ensure that visitors could understand the information we were sharing (I distinctly remember being told that “secular” was essentially specialist jargon!). These early experiences of the rewriting process helped me understand the importance of paying close attention to language and phrasing when writing for the public.
Since then, I’ve chased down various opportunities to write about my area of expertise for non-academic readers. In 2011, I started reviewing books and writing essays for the Times Literary Supplement, which I’ve been doing ever since. In 2018, I published an “op ed” with The Washington Post on what medieval law’s use of rumour and reputation could teach us about the Senate confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court justice candidate Brett Kavanaugh. Just as I had at the Getty, when writing for these publications I had to get comfortable with other people suggesting and even making changes to my words. When writing for the TLS, for example, I submit a draft, and then several weeks later I receive a copy-edited version with changes and queries. Once I’ve sent it back with my revisions, I wait for the PDF “proofs” to arrive, at which point I might find that further changes have been made to my prose, and that an accompanying title and image have been chosen (very rarely am I the person who chooses either). Proofs are my last chance to make final corrections to a piece, though usually I can only make very small changes.
Project
One recently completed public-facing project I particularly enjoyed working on was my short biography of Geoffrey Chaucer for Reaktion Press. In 2021, I was approached by an editor at Reaktion Press asking me whether I might be interested in writing a biography of Chaucer for their “Medieval Lives” series. Reaktion had come across my research on Chaucerian obscenity and wondered whether that might be a good angle for a new account of Chaucer’s life.
While I was extremely flattered to be approached, I was also extremely daunted: after all, Marion Turner’s magnificent, prizewinning Chaucer biography had been published only a couple of years prior! Mine would be a smaller undertaking for a different, less scholarly audience, and I felt it was important to have a sense of what that kind of publication might look like. Thankfully, Anthony Bale had recently published a biography of Margery Kempe in the same series, and a sneak peek at his proofs persuaded me that the project would be both rewarding and fun. It turns out I was right! (I’ve written about the proposal process—and shared a draft—in a post on my Substack newsletter “Page by Page”.)
Peek
In a room not far from Westminster Abbey, a man lies on his deathbed. Approaching sixty years of age, he has lived what many people in the year 1400 would have judged to be a long life. It has also been a colourful life, one that led him from the comfortable merchant household of his early childhood to an adulthood spent in the service of English royalty. He has travelled a great deal, visiting not only some of the great houses of medieval England, but great cities in France, Italy, Spain, and Flanders, among other places. He has performed a wide variety of jobs in the service of the recently deposed king, jobs related to diplomacy, customs, forestry, construction and jurisprudence. And he has managed to survive that king’s deposition with his own career more or less intact—the new king, Henry IV, had on his coronation day granted him the yearly sum of 40 marks for life.
But none of this is on his mind now. Here on his deathbed, he is instead plagued by guilt, shame and worry. True, he has not been convicted of any great crime, but what he has done is perhaps worse, since its consequences will be more enduring: he has written many poems ‘about the evil and most base love of men toward women’. Time and time again, he cries out in torment: ‘Woe is me, woe is me, because I will not be able now to call back or do away with those things…they will still continue to pass from person to person willy-nilly’.
Soon thereafter, he breathes his last.
This is one fifteenth-century account of the imagined deathbed lamentations of medieval England’s greatest poet: Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1342-1400). The description of Chaucer’s tormented mind appears in the writings of Thomas Gascoigne (1404-1458), a theologian and chancellor of the University of Oxford who was born four years after Chaucer’s death. While it is possible that his description is based on a reliable source, most scholars believe it to be derived in large part from the words of Chaucer’s own ‘Retractions’, an apparently remorseful text appended to some manuscript copies of his most famous work, The Canterbury Tales. In these ‘Retractions’, Chaucer addresses his readers directly:
I biseke yow mekely, for the mercy of God, that ye preye for me that Crist have mercy on me and foryeve me my giltes;/ and namely of my translacions and enditynges of worldly vanitees, the whiche I revoke in my retracciouns:/ as is the book of Troilus; the book also of Fame; the book of the XXV. Ladies; the book of the Duchesse; the book of Seint Valentynes day of the Parlement of Briddes; the tales of Caunterbury, thilke that sownen into synne; the book of the Leoun; and many another book…and many a song and many a leccherous lay[.]
I beseech you meekly, for the mercy of God, that you pray for me that Christ have mercy on me and forgive me my guilts, and namely for my translations and compositions of worldly vanities, which I revoke in my retractions: such as the book of Troilus; also the book of Fame; the book of the twenty-five Ladies; the book of the Duchess; the book of Saint Valentine’s Day of the Parliament of Birds; the tales of Canterbury, those which concern sin; the book of the Lion; and many another book…and many a song and many a lecherous poem.
It is difficult to know what to make of Chaucer’s supposed renunciations of his ‘enditynges of worldly vanitees’, particularly since they include most of his best-known and best-loved works. Was Chaucer really so ashamed and guilt-ridden at the thought of what he had written over the course of his life? Could the man who created the outspoken Wife of Bath—and who wrote probably the most famous fart joke in all of English literature—really have sought to erase such work from his legacy?
What makes these questions particularly complicated for present-day readers is the image of Chaucer that has accumulated over the last six centuries: that of a brilliant poet who was playful, ironic, self-deprecating and—perhaps above all, in the contemporary imagination—amusing. Which precise quality comes to be in ascendance has shifted over time, with these and other characteristics periodically coming to the fore in Chaucer commentary and then receding into the background. The fifteenth century celebrated him as the first master of poetic eloquence in English. To this picture the sixteenth century added praise of his social satire and his apparent anticipation of Reformation values. By the eighteenth century, while some writers might have described the ‘Temper’ of the so-called Father of English Poetry as ‘a mixture of the gay, the modest, and the grave’, Daniel Defoe declared Chaucer’s bawdy texts ‘not fit for Modest persons to read’. Such objections notwithstanding, the next century saw a new surge of scholarly interest in Chaucer’s life and works, as well as the publication of the first children’s adaptations of Chaucer in 1833. By the end of the twentieth century, Chaucer’s name had become synonymous with ribaldry. More recently, some of Chaucer’s work has increasingly come under scrutiny for its latent misogyny, antisemitism or racism, a shift that has prompted readers to reflect more deeply on the ethics of the entertainment Chaucer’s works so often provide.
This book considers Chaucer’s life and work in relation to his reputation for mirth and merriment, in order to explore how he became the poet he is for us today. Not all of Chaucer’s readers have considered him to be first and foremost a writer of comic verse, but this does not mean that a Chaucer biography must ignore his contemporary reputation as a humourist. In fact, when we consider his life through the lens of that reputation, we can see more clearly how a combination of skill, diplomacy and good fortune enabled Chaucer to navigate one of the most turbulent periods of medieval English history.
Prompts
The following exercises can help you draw general readers into a specialist topic, bring that topic to life on the page, and develop a structure for your public-facing writing (or any other kind of writing!).
(1) Heave your brain’s guts out: Think of this as a “guided brain dump.” It’s what I used to figure out how to structure my book, but it’s a useful exercise no matter what the shape/length/form of your writing project is. I knew I wanted my book to be a biography that shaped by Chaucer’s contemporary reputation as a humorist, so I sat down and typed out everything I could think of related to his humour off the top of my head. It helped me pinpoint which aspects of Chaucer’s life and work to cover, and how to divide the book up into chapters. Give it a try: Set yourself a specific amount of time (anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes) and write down everything you think is most important about your chosen topic. Do this without looking at anything anyone else has written: off the top of your head, what does your reader absolutely have to know? Once you’ve got a bunch of stuff on the page, see how much of it you can “cluster together” under different themes or sub-topics.
(2) Hook your reader: For me, the very best public-facing writing about specialist subjects starts by plunging me into a specific detail related to the topic at hand. It’s also something I was told by my first agent, who knows a lot more than I do about writing successful nonfiction! The detail in question could be an object, a strange characteristic of a given genre, a specific moment in history, popular (mis)conceptions of a given topic, or really almost anything. The prologue to Cat Jarman’s bestselling River Kings starts with the 1982 discovery of a single orange bead at a Viking burial site in Derbyshire. In the extract from my Chaucer biography above, I begin with a probably untrue (but real!) medieval description of Chaucer’s deathbed. Give it a try: What do you find the most fascinating character/moment/example related to the topic you’re writing about? Is there an anecdote or popular myth that captures the essence of your subject? Is there a massive ongoing debate about your topic, or a mystery that still hasn’t been solved? Try using this as a starting point for your writing project. It’s often a useful place to start thinking from even if it changes later!
Harness the senses: This is a great tip I got from a developmental editor who’d spent years working in major publishing houses. If you’re trying to figure out how to really immerse your reader in your subject, see if you can get into sensory detail. Jarman gives tons of visual and tactile detail when she describes her first encounter with the bead that starts River Kings.When I was writing about the part of London where Chaucer spent his earliest years, I used the senses to work backwards in time: I described what it sounded like now, and what street signs gave clues about its medieval history. Whether you’re describing a person, a historical moment, a material object, or a specific location, play around with writing about it using as much detail as you can from as many of the five senses as possible. Even if you don’t end up using all of it (or any of it!), it’s a great way to fire up your brain and to remind yourself of how rich your topic is—something that’s regrettably easy to forget about when you’re a specialist!
Thanks so much to Mary for this wonderful post! If her “peek” has captured your interest, we have some wonderful news for you: Reaktion Press has kindly provided a discount for our readers.
For 20% off RRP, please visit www.reaktionbooks.co.uk and enter code CHAUCER25 at checkout. Offer valid until 31 December 2025.
T&Cs apply.
