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Siobhain Bly Calkin

Associate Professor

Research Interests

Current Research

I am intrigued by the ways in which medieval texts circulated, and by their cultural engagements with the world that produced and consumed them. Medieval depictions of cross-cultural contact, conflict and conquest, especially across religious lines, also fascinate me and have been the focus of much of my research.

My first book, Saracens and the Making of English Identity (Routledge 2005; paperback 2009) and many of my articles discuss the depictions of Muslims in late medieval English texts and their relation to ideas of nationalism, chivalry, violence, and crusade. Questions about manuscript culture, its fluidity, and the reception of antecedent texts also animate much of my work.

I am currently finishing up a book entitled Narratives of Impassioned Things: Rethinking Relic Agency through Tales of the Lance of Antioch and the Cross of Jerusalem. It examines English, French and Latin crusading narratives produced between 1095 and 1500CE, studying how such texts illuminate late medieval Christian ideas about the ways in which devotional objects manifest agency in multicultural contexts. I am particularly interested in the theological and cultural challenges encountered when medieval writers narrate episodes (whether lived or imagined) about Christian relics manifesting power in contexts of Muslim-Christian encounter and Muslim disbelief. This research has led me into a sustained consideration of thing theory, medieval materialism, and the ways in which culturally significant objects structure and inform the human subjects around them in multifaceted and multidirectional ways.

Honours and Awards

Selected Recent Publications

Co-editor with Matthew Aiello, Special Issue: “Retracing Trauma’s Theories in Premodern Literature,” Exemplaria 37.1 (2025). DOI: 10.1080/10412573.2025.2464428

“Passion Relic Devotion, an Implanted Relic, and a Prostheticized Body: Rethinking Matter and Agency in ‘A Grete Myracle of a Knyghte Good Callyd Syr Roger Wallysborow’,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 54.2 (2024): 299-332.

Co-author with Danielle Taylor, “Crusades.” In The Chaucer Encyclopedia, edited by Richard Newhauser et al., vol. 2. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2023.

Relic Tales: A Descriptive Catalogue of Medieval Narratives Recounting the Circulation of Christian Passion Relics in Mixed Muslim-Christian Contexts. Co-authored with Hisham Al Khatib and Danielle Taylor. Released: February 2022

“Narrating Trauma? Captured Cross Relics in Chronicles and chansons de geste,” Exemplaria 33.1 (2021): 19-43.

Recent Papers Presented

“Celebrating the Thingly Affordances of Passion Relics in Muslim-Christian Contexts,” New Chaucer Society, 23rd Biennial Congress, Pasadena, USA, July 15-18, 2024.

“Tips on Publishing Articles: A Scholar’s Perspective,” Canadian Society of Medievalists / Société canadienne des médiévistes Annual Congress, York University, Toronto, Ontario, May 27-29, 2023.

“Speaking Devotional Instruction Across Religious Divides: The ‘Four sarȝins’ from Ethiopia in Bible Anonyme and Cursor Mundi,” New Chaucer Society, 22nd Biennial Congress, University of Durham, Durham, UK, July 11-15, 2022.

“Narratives of Seeking: Rethinking Theoretical Models of How Trauma Manifests Textually,” 57th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, May 9-14, 2022. Online.

“What Happens When Skin Meets Cross-Wood? Changes in Skin Colour and Constructions of Whiteness, Blackness, and Religious Devotion in Cursor Mundi,” Approaches to Skin in Literature and Culture, Virtual Workshop, University of Bern and University of Surrey, June 10-11, 2021.

Research Papers and Theses Supervised

Danielle Taylor, (Ph. D) Fraternity and Governance in Fifteenth-Century English Literature, 2021

Alicia Haniford, (MA) “Negotiating Narrative Constructs of Past and Present in Bevis of Hampton and Guy of Warwick,” 2020 (University Medal)

Meghan Tibbits-Lamirande, (MA) “To Be(Head) or Not to Be(Head): Decapitation in Richard Coer de Lyon,” 2019.

Francine Harris, (MA) “The Identity-defining Role of Forgetting in Transformative Disguise in two Middle English Romances: Havelok the Dane and Sir Isumbras,” 2018 (Senate Medal)

Montana McLaughlin Tom, (MA) “Word and Image in the Ellesmere Manuscript and Two Later Versions of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales” 2017.

Polina Svadkovskaia, (MA) “Gendered Space and Power Symbol: Imagining the Castle in Middle English Romance,” 2017.

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