Laura L. Howes, an associate professor of English and the interim director of the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, is co-editor of a new edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with Marie Borroff of Yale University. The book, published in the Norton Critical Edition series, is a late 14th-century Middle English romance outlining an adventure of Sir Gawain, a knight of King Arthur’s Round Table. It also includes two French tales about Sir Gawain, three sections from the original Middle English poem, ten interpretive essays about the central concerns of the work, a chronology of important historical and literary dates, and a selected bibliography.
Howes’ first book, Chaucer’s Gardens and the Language of Convention, established her as one of the leading commentators on landscape in Medieval literature, a reputation solidified in 2007 when her edited anthology, Place, Space, and Landscape in Medieval Narrative, was published. This spring and summer Howes is presenting work from her next book project, Trekking the Medieval Landscape, at the Medieval Academy meeting in New Haven, CT, and at the New Chaucer Society meeting in Siena, Italy.
The research of Laura L. Howes is featured in the Selected Works Author Gallery of Trace, UT’s digital showcase and archive.
Selected Publications
Ed., with Marie Borroff, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 2009.
Ed., Place, Space, and Landscape in Medieval Narrative. Tennessee Studies in Literature. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007.
“Chaucer’s Criseyde: The Betrayer Betrayed.” Essays in Honor of Robert W. Hanning. Ed. Sandra Pierson Prior and Robert Stein. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. 342-43.
“‘The Slow Curve of the Footwalker’: Narrative Time and Literary Landscapes in Middle English Poetry.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 83.1 (2000): 165-81; reprinted in Inventing Medieval Landscapes: Senses of Place in Western Europe, ed. John Howe and Michael Wolfe. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. 192-207.
Chaucer’s Gardens and the Language of Convention. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997.
“Theophany in the ‘Miller’s Tale.'” With Frederick M. Biggs. Medium Ævum 65.2 (1996): 269-79.
“Cultured Nature in Chaucer’s Early Dream-Poems.” The Medieval World of Nature: A Book of Essays. Ed. Joyce Salisbury. NY: Garland, 1993. 187-200.
“Are There Benefits to Marginality?” Medieval Feminist Newsletter 15 (1993): 3-4.
“On the Birth of Margery Kempe’s Last Child.” Modern Philology 90.2 (Nov. 1992): 220-25.
Visit the Quest Gallery at Trace, UT’s digital archive, to access publications of other Quest Scholars of the Week.