Social Bonds in Middle English Ghost and Vision Narratives

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The project will examine representations of social relationships (including marriage, parenthood, and broader social bonds) in medieval texts depicting encounters between living and dead from 14th and 15th-century England, producing new insights regarding the role of death and purgatory in informingconcepts of gender, family, and community. Literary depictions will be discussed alongside non-literary textual evidence, including testaments and commemorative epigraphs, to illuminate how different types of social relationships were perceived and performed through the social structures (funeral, intercessory prayer, inheritance, commemoration) attendant on death, during a period in which the lay community was becoming increasingly involved in devotional culture.Specific strands of study will include: considerations of parental/filial relationships in narratives (such as The Trental of Gregory, The Awntyrs off Arthure, Three Dead Kings and The Child of Bristowe) and how their representations of these bonds (and attendant issues of filial and parental responsibility, love andinheritance) are inflected by gender and social status; the ambiguous role of widowhood and marriage in narratives such as The Gast of Gy, and how it contrasts with evidence from the period regarding the increasing role of widows in safeguarding their husbands' souls in Purgatory; and how purgatory and thesocial structures around death generate social bonds through gendered self-identification in texts such as Sir Amadace and A Revelation of Purgatory Shown to a Holy Woman.The representation of the dead in late medieval England has been an object of study for me at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, allowing me to develop a strong knowledge base regarding this subject from which to pursue this program; my recent master's thesis focused upon the role of the utterances of the dead in framing spiritual authority in a similar assortment of texts. This project represents an important new direction for my studies, focusing on the particularity of how these representations differ according to gender and social role. I have received training in manuscript theory and palaeography relevant to my project during my master's program, and my coursework essay on the scribal practice of the scribe of the MS Douce 324 copy of Awntyrs was judged by examiners to be suitable for development towards publication. In order to properly pursue arguments involving relevant Latin material (epigraphs, as well as sources and analogues of texts under discussion) I will need to receive training in Latin as part of my programme of study.