CML Affiliate Member Lydia Zeldenrust Awarded Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship
Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship for the project "Continental Connections: European Bestselling Romances in England (c. 1400-1600)"
Lydia Zeldenrust, Associate Lecturer at the Department of English and Related Literature, University of York, has been awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, for the project ‘Continental Connections: European Bestselling Romances in England (c. 1400-1600).’ The project will run for three years from October 2019. Lydia will hold the fellowship in the Department of English at York and participate in the activities of the Centre for Medieval Literature.
The project will examine a group of European bestselling romances that arrive in England in the late medieval period and fuel new translation and printing activities. These have a complex international genealogy and have received little scholarly attention, as they do not fit neatly with national canons or the usual focus on Anglo-French exchanges. The project breaks important ground by placing the English versions within a pan-European framework, to trace the international networks surrounding their production and readership, and to uncover to what extent they actively participate in European literary traditions and which features might set the English versions apart. The project integrates literary analysis with book history and the study of social networks, translations, and patterns of textual transmission, all within a multilingual, transcultural framework. It aims to move beyond established paradigms of separate national traditions, manuscript versus print, and medieval versus early modern, offering a much richer understanding of England’s place in European literary history.
The Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship is a fiercely competitive award, which aims to provide career development opportunities for those who are at a relatively early stage of their academic careers, but with a proven record of research. The Leverhulme Trust seeks to fund outstanding scholarship and is particularly encouraging of research that is original and enables a refreshing departure from established patterns.