• »Bangor Home
• »School of English

Dr Sue Niebrzydowski MA, PhD, PGCHE

Enjoys teaching

Late medieval drama and poetry, especially Chaucer, palaeography and codicology.  I would be delighted to work with postgraduates interested in medieval womanhood and in Chaucer, especially ways in which medieval literature is in dialogue with non-literary works, including the visual arts.

Research Profile

I work on women and the dialogue between literature and cultural texts that attempt to construct paradigms of medieval womanhood. While virgins and widows have had plenty of scholarly and popular attention, in monographs, novels and films, wives – and the middle aged – have not.  Why not?  Arising from my recent monograph examining wives in late medieval literature my current project – culminating in a conference (view BBC news item) and a volume of edited essays - is an interrogation of middle-aged women in the Middle Ages.

My other main research interest is medieval English presentations of Mary:  how these are determined by contemporary constructions of womanhood and how real medieval women responded to theMother of God. Under the auspices of IMEMS I am at the planning stage of a collaborative project examining the specifics of medieval Marian devotion in the British Isles.

Pre-Modern Travel Research Network (PREMOT)

• Please visit the new premot.bangor.ac.uk website

Major Publications

English; The Journal of the English Association (Oxford Journals, Oxford University Press, 2008)

‘“So wel koude he me glose”: The Erotics of Touch in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue’, Eroticism in Medieval Literature, ed. Cory Rushton and Amanda Hopkins (Woodbridge:  Boydell and Brewer, 2007).

Bonoure and Buxum: A Study of Wives in Late Medieval English Literature (New York:  Peter Lang AG, 2006)

‘From Scriptorium to Internet: the implication of audience on the translation of the Psalms from the St Albans Psalter’, Translation and Religion: Holy Untranslatable?, ed. Lynne Long, (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, June 2005), 151-61.

‘Encouraging Marriage IN FACIE ECCLESIAE: The Mary Play ‘Betrothal’ and the Sarum Ordo ad faciendum Sponsalia’, Medieval English Theatre 24 (2002), 44-61.

AHRC Funded Translation and Explanatory Commentary of the Calendar, Psalter and Canticles of the online edition (2003) of the St Albans Psalter,

‘Monstrous (M)othering: The Representation of the Sowdanesse in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale’, Consuming Narratives: Gender and Monstrous Appetite in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed.Liz Herbert McAvoy and Teresa Walters (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002),  196-207.

The Sultana and Her Sisters: Black Women in the British Isles before 1530,’ Women’s History Review 10.2 (2001), 187-210.

Current Support for Others' Research

2007 - Conference Secretary for Medieval English Theatre .

2007- co-convenor IMEMS Research Seminars

Co-editor, Reviews (Medieval and Early Modern), for English, the journal of the English Association. If you are a lecturer in English, or a postgraduate student, with an interest in reviewing for the journal please send a brief list of your interests and expertise to Englishjournal@bangor.ac.uk

Research Lecturer, Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies and the School of English, tasked with developing the Research Group women and the sacred.