Dr. J. R. Mattison is a medievalist and early modernist, with a particular interest in material culture, multilingualism, translation, and the history of the book. Her current research examines the literature and material texts of England and France in a transcultural context. Her research has appeared in the Huntington Library Quarterly, Book History, The Library, Medium Aevum, and elsewhere. She is co-editing a special issue of Digital Philology with Hannah Ryley, called 'Big Data and Manuscript Studies'. She is working on a monograph, French and the English Idea of the Book, 1380-1542, which argues for the importance of French to developing vernacular ideas of the book in the period. Her current work also includes a census of all French manuscripts known to have been in England in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and a reassessment of the role of migrant scribes working in England in the later Middle Ages.
Before arriving at UGA, Dr. Mattison was assistant professor of medieval and Tudor literature at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow in English at the University of British Columbia.
Education
PhD, English, University of Toronto
MPhil, English (Medieval), University of Oxford
BA, English and French, Yale University
Selected Publications
“Between Men: French Books and Male Readers in the Hundred Years War,” in Literatures of the Hundred Years War, ed. R.D. Perry and Daniel Davies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024): 303-29
“Books, Translation, and Multilingualism in Late Medieval Calais,” New Medieval Literatures 24 (2024), 199–245
“The Prioress’s Tale and La France juive: Chaucer in Nineteenth-Century French Antisemitism,” Chaucer Review 59.3 (2024): 316-40
with Tamara Atkin, “A New Witness to Béroul’s Tristan,” Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America 117.1 (2023): 5-39
with Alexandra Gillespie, “Books and Materiality,” in The Routledge Companion to Medieval English Literature, ed. Sif Ríkharðsdóttir and Raluca Radulescu (Routledge, 2022), 39-56
“Books in Books: The Idea of the Book in the Fifteenth-Century English Visual Imagination,” Book History 24.2 (2021): 267–96
“Universalizing Doublets in Middle English Verse: Chaucer and Romance,” Medium Aevum 90.1 (2021): 24–50
“‘Longe stories aword may not expresse’: Tables of Contents in Lydgate’s Fall of Princes,” Huntington Library Quarterly 83.1 (2020): 1–31