Staff profiles
Professor Elliot Kendall
Associate Professor
2454
01392 722454
I research and teach medieval literature and I have recently been Director of Research for the department. I am especially interested in politics and literature. In my current research, I'm approaching medieval texts with the help of historians' and anthropologists' thinking on why and how humans (not just medieval ones) cooperate.
My office is Queen's 212. For an office hour appointment, please book online.
Research interests
My chief research interests are late medieval literature and politics, especially concerning the aristocracy in medieval society. At the moment, I am using anthropological theory to discover 'political logics', or the ways in which medieval texts think people (ought to) cooperate.
This broad theme covers more and less formal social networks and state power. I am writing a book on this theme in a wide range of texts circulating between 1450 and 1520, covering, for example, Malory, Skelton, Hawes, More, verse romances, and household plays. In Lordship and Literature: John Gower and the Politics of the Great Household (OUP, 2008), I focus on the great household and Gower's Confessio Amantis and I have published articles on Chaucer's Shipman's Tale and competing economic modes, Sir Orfeo, Robin Hood, cooperation in an Arthurian romance, and political centralization and early Tudor literature.