Alexandra Barnes
book history; medieval literature; heresy; religious reform; theology; devotional prose; intellectual history; hermeneutics; comparative literature
My research is concerned with late-medieval religious controversy, specifically the Wycliffite heresy. I am particularly interested in how the academic genres of biblical commentary and florilegia favoured by Wycliffites overlap with popular devotional writings. My previous research (to appear in print in 2025), examined the transmission of academic methods of visualising information into the manuscript layouts of popular devotional tracts.
Currently, I'm researching a Wycliffite text deeply invested in popular discourses of affective piety: a commentary on the Psalms known as RV3. This extensive commentary, completed around the turn of the 15th century, interests me as a reference point for reformist scriptural hermeneutics. Through the Psalms, the Wycliffite commentator[s] fashions an understanding of his own status as the member of a persecuted sect existing in the final, apocalyptic age of the Catholic Church.
My doctorate is supervised by Professor Michael Van Dussen and I am currently working with him as a research assistant on a project centred on reformist encyclopaedias. This work examines manuscripts of two related Wycliffite florilegia, the Floretum and Rosarium, which were copied widely in England and Bohemia.
PhD 鶹AV, exp. 2028
MSt Medieval English (Distinction) University of Oxford, 2022
BA (Hons.) 鶹AV, 2021
book history; medieval literature; heresy; religious reform; theology; devotional prose; intellectual history; hermeneutics; comparative literature
Articles and Book Chapters
Alexandra Barnes, “Authority in the Margins: The Apparatus of Biblical Commentary in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS 938,” in Medieval Commentary: New Perspectives, eds. Cosima Gillhammer and Audrey Southgate (Boydell & Brewer). Forthcoming, 2025.
Public scholarship
Alexandra Barnes, Peer-reviewed blog post for Question, 2022.
SSHRC Doctoral Scholarship, 2023
Anne Hudson Doctoral Studentship (University of Oxford), 2023 (declined)
Cecily Clark Studentship in Middle English Philology (University of Oxford), 2021
Ruth and Nevill Mott Scholarship (University of Oxford), 2021
Algy Smillie Noad Memorial Prize (鶹AV), 2021