Fabienne Michelet

Fabienne Michelet is Assistant Professor of medieval literature in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. Her teaching and research focus on medieval English literature, especially Old English poetry; cultural geography and questions of space and place; discourses of heroism and heroic agency. Her first book, Creation, Migration and Conquest: Imaginary Geography and Sense of Space in Old English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), explores spatial representations found both in historical documents and in verse; it examines how the Anglo-Saxons’ spatial imaginaire shapes perceptions and representations of geographical space. Her new project, Questions of Heroism/Heroism in Question in Old English Literature, analyses how the heroic figure is constructed in language, with a particular focus on the thematic and stylistic conventions that are used to ‘heroify’ a protagonist. Much of her recent work has focused on the links between place, identity, and collective memory, on the intersections of fictional and economic discourses, on mediality, and on food and body practices.

Publications

Books

Creation, Migration, and Conquest: Imaginary Geography and Sense of Space in Old English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 

Edited book

Cultures in Contact, Past and Present: Studies in Honor of Paul Beekman Taylor (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1999) [special issue of Multilingua] (with Guillemette Bolens and Margaret Bridges).

Selected Articles & Book Chapters

With Ruth Wehlau. ‘Introduction: Darkness in the Universe, Darkness in the Mind in Anglo-Saxon Literature', in Ruth Wehlau (ed.), Darkness, Depression, and Descent in Anglo-Saxon England, Richard Rawlinson Center Series in Anglo-Saxon Studies (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2019), pp. 1-12.

‘Adventus saxonum' in Siân Echard and Robert Rouse (eds), The Encyclopedia of British Medieval Literature (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017).

‘Hospitality, Hostility, and Peacemaking in Beowulf', Philological Quarterly 94 (2015), 23-50.

‘Lost at sea: nautical travels in the Old English Exodus, the Old English Andreas and accounts of the adventus Saxonum', in Sebastian I. Sobecki (ed), The Sea and Englishness in the Middle Ages: Maritime Narratives, Identity and Culture (Cambridge: Brewer, 2011), pp. 59-79. 

‘Eating Bodies in the Old English Andreas', in Nicole Nyffenegger and Katrin Rupp (eds), Fleshly Things and Spiritual Matters (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), pp. 165-92.

‘Entre pierre et parchemin: le Dream of the Rood et la croix de Ruthwell', in René Wetzel and Fabrice Flückiger (eds), Au-delà de l'illustration : texte et image au moyen âge (Zürich : Chronos, 2009), pp. 61-82. 

‘The Fabric of Society: Money, Cloth, and Symbolic Exchanges in Njal's saga', in Susan Bruce and Valeria Wagner (eds), Fiction and Economy (London: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 114-33. 

‘Reading and Writing the East in Mandeville's Travels', in Lydia Wegener and Andreas Speer (eds), Wissen über Grenzen: Arabisches Wissen und Lateinisches Mittelalter (Miscellanea Mediaevalia 33) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006), pp. 282-302.

Forthcoming Publications 

With Martin Pickavé. ‘Philosophy', in Suzanne Akbari (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Forthcoming.

‘"He is to freonde god": Wealth in the Poetry of Cynewulf', Review of English Studies. Forthcoming.