Isabel Davis
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Overview
Overview
Biography
Isabel Davis is a Reader in Medieval Literature and Culture. She teaches on the BA in English, MA Medieval Literature and Culture, and supervises doctoral work on late medieval literature and medical humanities work on the cultural history of pregnancy and fertility. She is director of Birkbeck's Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Worlds.
Davis has published extensively on the histories of gender, sexual ethics and devotional culture in the late Middle Ages. More recently her work has taken a medical humanities turn and she is currently researching a book on the history of trying and struggling to conceive.
Her most recent work is available in peer-reviewed journals. Several of these articles are freely available online, but many are through subscription-only resources. If you don't have a subscription but would like to read one, email her to request a PDF file.
Highlights
Isabel Davis's most recent article on the history of 'un-pregnancy' (open access).
Isabel Davis's most recent work on Reformation print culture.
Isabel Davis talks to Peter Adamson (History of Philosophy Without any Gaps Podcast) about the Geoffrey Chaucer's Wife of Bath, marriage and sexual ethics.
Isabel Davis's recent contribution to The Fertility Podcast.
Qualifications
- PhD Medieval Studies, University of York, 2002
- MA Late Medieval Studies, University of York, 1998
- BA English and Related Literatures, University of York, 1997
- Postgraduate Certificate in Lifelong Learning, Birkbeck, University of London, 2007
Web profiles
Administrative responsibilities
- Departmental Research Director
Professional activities
Davis is on the editorial board for the Chaucer Studies Series at Boydell and Brewer.
Davis sits on the editorial board for the Yearbook of Langland Studies
ORCID
0000-0003-1055-523X -
Supervision and teaching
Supervision and teaching
Supervision
Isabel Davis can consider proposals from prospective students on late medieval culture and literature, and cultural history projects on maternity and fertility.
Current doctoral researchers
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KATE ERRINGTON
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KIERRI PRICE
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NATALIE GREENWOOD
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ORLA CUBITT
Doctoral alumni since 2013-14
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MELANIE SOCRATES
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WILLIAM HORN
Teaching
Teaching modules
- Teaching Arts in Higher Education (AREN071Z7)
- Writing The Self (AREN238S7)
- Storytelling: Narrative Archetypes, Forms and Techniques (AREN256S4)
- Medieval and Renaissance Body, Mind, and Soul (AREN259S6)
- Medievalism: Re-presenting the Middle Ages (AREN268S7)
- Creative Non-Fiction (ENHU002S7)
- Medieval and Renaissance Literatures (ENHU003S5)
- Reading Literature (ENHU006S4)
- Introduction to Screenwriting (ENHU040S7)
- Contemporary Writing 2: Genre (ENHU041S7)
- Methods: Medicine, Culture, Text (SSHC484S7)
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Publications
Publications
Article
- Davis, Isabel (2019) The experimental conception hospital: dating pregnancy and the gothic imagination. Social History of Medicine 32 (4), pp. 773-798. ISSN 0951-631X.
- Davis, Isabel (2019) Love, wind eggs, and mere conceptions: non-generation in William Harvey’s De conceptione. Textual Practice 33 (8), pp. 1321-1340. ISSN 0950-236X.
- Davis, Isabel (2019) Tales of the unexpected: A Marian woodcut in The Book of Common Prayer. Notes and Queries 66 (3), pp. 384-387. ISSN 0029-3970.
- Davis, Isabel (2017) Conceiving histories: a project exploring ‘un-pregnancy’ in the past. Journal of Fertility Counselling 24 (3), pp. 13-15. ISSN 1365-8913.
- Davis, Isabel (2016) Prosthesis and reformation: the Black Rubric and the reinvention of kneeling. Textual Practice 30 (7), pp. 1209-1231. ISSN 0950-236X.
- Davis, Isabel (2014) Histoire et poésie: la Femme de Bath de Geoffrey Chaucer et la comédie de l’allégorie eschatologique. Cahiers électroniques d’histoire textuelle du LAMOP 6, ISSN 2261-3331.
- Davis, Isabel (2012) Calling: Langland, Gower and Chaucer on Saint Paul. Studies In The Age of Chaucer 34, pp. 53-97. ISSN 0190-2407.
- Davis, Isabel (2011) ‘Ye that pasen by þe weiye’: time, topology and the medieval use of Lamentations 1.12. Textual Practice 25 (3), pp. 437-472. ISSN 0950-236X.
- Davis, Isabel (2011) "The Trinite is our everlasting lover": marriage and trinitarian love in the later Middle Ages. Speculum 86 (4), pp. 914-963. ISSN 0038-7134.
- Davis, Isabel (2009) Expressing the middle English I. Literature Compass 6 (4), pp. 842-863. ISSN 1741-4113.
- Davis, Isabel (2008) Piers Plowman and the querelle of the rose: marriage, caritas and the peacock's 'pennes'. New Medieval Literatures 10, pp. 49-86. ISSN 1465-3737.
Book
- Davis, Isabel (2010) Writing masculinity in the later Middle Ages. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521142175.
- Davis, Isabel and Muller, M. and Rees Jones, S., eds. (2003) Love, marriage, and family ties in the later Middle Ages. International Medieval Research. 11, Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers. ISBN 9782503522074.
Book Section
- Davis, Isabel (2021) Histoire et poésie: la Femme de Bath de Geoffrey Chaucer et la comédie de l’allégorie eschatologique. In: Fletcher, C. and Vagnon, E. (eds.) Le Moyen Âge dans le texte II: Au-delà de l'écrit. Série Lamop. Paris, France: Éditions de la Sorbonne. pp. 19-49. ISSN 2261-3331. ISBN 9791035106379.
- Davis, Isabel (2017) Prosthesis and reformation: the Black Rubric and the reinvention of kneeling. In: Porter, C. and Walter, K.L. and Healy, M. (eds.) Prosthesis in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. ISBN 9781138095311.
- Davis, Isabel (2015) Introduction. In: Davis, Isabel and Nall, C. (eds.) Chaucer and Fame: Reputation and Reception. Chaucer Studies. Cambridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer. pp. 1-20. ISBN 9781843844075.
- Davis, Isabel (2013) Class. In: Turner, M. (ed.) A Handbook of Middle English Studies. Wiley-Blackwell Critical Theory Handbooks. Hoboken, U.S.: Wiley. pp. 285-298. ISBN 9780470655382.
- Davis, Isabel (2013) Cutaneous time in the late Medieval literary imagination. In: Walter, K.L. (ed.) Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 99-118. ISBN 9780230338708.
- Davis, Isabel (2008) On the sadness of not being a bird: late-medieval marriage ideologies and the figure of Abraham in William Langland’s Piers Plowman. In: Kowaleski, M. and Goldberg, P.J.P. (eds.) Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing and Household in Medieval England. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 209-231. ISBN 9780521899208.
- Davis, Isabel (2004) Men and Margery: negotiating medieval patriarchy. In: Arnold, John H. and Lewis, K.J. (eds.) A Companion to the Book of Margery Kempe. Cambridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer. pp. 35-54. ISBN 9781843840305.
- Davis, Isabel (2004) John Gower's fear of flying: transitional masculinities in the Confessio Amantis. In: McDonald, N.F. and Ormrod, W.M. (eds.) Rites of Passage: Cultures of Transition in the Fourteenth Century. Cambridge, UK: York Medieval Press. pp. 131-152. ISBN 9781903153154.
- Davis, Isabel (2003) Introduction — Unfamiliar families: investigating marriage and the family in the past. In: Davis, Isabel and Muller, M. and Rees Jones, S. (eds.) Love, Marriage, and Family Ties in the Later Middle Ages. International Medieval Research. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers. pp. 1-13. ISBN 9782503522074.
- Davis, Isabel (2002) Consuming the body of the working man in the later Middle Ages. In: Mcavoy, L.H. and Walters, T. (eds.) Consuming Narratives: Gender and Monstrous Appetite in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Cardiff, Wales: University of Wales Press. pp. 42-53. ISBN 9780708317433.