Medieval literature postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in medieval writing began with a second-year module on Chaucer and grew into the habit that now takes up most of my evenings: sitting with a facsimile page and working out, letter by letter, what a scribe actually wrote. I began this after a seminar in which we compared two editions of a short lyric and found that the punctuation, entirely modern, had settled an ambiguity the manuscript left open. I wanted to see the earlier stage of the text for myself, so I borrowed printed facsimiles from my university library and taught myself to read secretary and anglicana hands well enough to transcribe slowly and with frequent corrections. I am not a trained palaeographer, but I now understand why editorial decisions matter, and I would like formal teaching in the skills I have approached piecemeal.

My dissertation considered how dream-vision frames manage the authority of the speaker, focusing on Chaucer's House of Fame alongside Pearl. What drew me was the unreliability built into the form: the dreamer is confused, the material is borrowed, and the poem keeps drawing attention to its own construction. I argued that this uncertainty is not a weakness to be explained away but part of how the poems think about knowledge. Writing it taught me to slow down over a passage and to be honest about the limits of an argument; my supervisor's most useful comment was that I had been over-claiming on the basis of three lines, and cutting that section improved the chapter.

Alongside my degree I worked in a supermarket and now work three days a week as a library assistant, mainly on the issue desk and shelving, with some time on the local studies collection. The work has made me practical about how texts survive and circulate: what gets catalogued, what is in poor condition, what nobody has requested for years. I also volunteer one morning a fortnight at the county records office, where I help list parish registers and overseers' accounts. This is ordinary sorting and box-listing work rather than research, but reading eighteenth-century and occasionally earlier hands regularly has improved my eye considerably, and I have become comfortable with the gap between a document and a usable description of it.

Last year two of us ran a small reading group for undergraduates on Middle English lyrics. We chose short texts, circulated a glossary in advance, and asked people to read aloud before discussing anything, which turned out to matter more than we expected: hearing the alliteration and the rhythm made the poems far less forbidding. Between six and ten people came each fortnight for a term. It was a modest undertaking, and my share was mostly the glossaries and the room booking, but I learned how much preparation a good discussion needs and how quickly confidence grows when the language stops being an obstacle.

For postgraduate study I want to widen my reading beyond the fourteenth century and beyond English, particularly into devotional prose and into Anglo-Norman and Latin material that shaped the texts I know best. My Latin is elementary and I intend to keep working at it. I hope to pursue questions about how manuscript context shapes interpretation, perhaps through a dissertation on the arrangement of texts within a single miscellany. Longer term I am considering doctoral research or archival work; either way I want the training in languages, palaeography and textual editing that I have so far only sampled.

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