Dr Lucy Hinnie - orcid.org/0000-0001-6217-6691
Postdoctoral Fellow, March - August 2023, December 2023 - March 2024
Dr Lucy R. Hinnie (she/her) completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 2019. From 2019-21, she held a Leverhulme Study Abroad Scholarship as a white settler scholar on Treaty Six Territory and the Homeland of the Métis at the University of Saskatchewan, where she was a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Department of English and the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Her research interests include late medieval and early modern literature, Older Scots poetry, medieval feminist criticism and the pedagogical potential of the digital humanities. She is an enthusiastic advocate for open knowledge and the use of Wiki platforms in academic contexts.
Her doctoral research focussed on the medieval querelle des femmes and the 1568 Bannatyne Manuscript, while her postdoctoral project delivered a TEI-encoded edition of the fourth section of the Bannatyne. She is an Associate Editor at the Journal of the Northern Renaissance, a member of the TEI By Example International Advisory Committee, and from March 2021, the Wikimedian-in-Residence at the British Library. She has had articles published in Etudés Episteme and The Chaucer Review, and is a prolific pop culture podcaster. Her most recent research paper focussed on James VI and I and questions of bisexual erasure.
Project Title: A Scottish Querelle: Debating the Feminine in the Bannatyne MS (c. 1568)
This fellowship will support research for Lucy’s monograph work on the Bannatyne manuscript. The Bannatyne is the largest extant miscellany of late-medieval and early modern Scottish literature. Compiled by young Edinburgh lawyer, George Bannatyne, in ‘tyme of pest’, the manuscript contains over 400 pieces of verse, divided into five sections: theology, morality, comedy, love and fables. Now National Library of Scotland, Adv. 1.1.6., it is a repository for established Scottish poets, yet also contains a wealth of anonymous and obscure verse, while the incipient Reformation and reign of Mary Queen of Scots are the backdrop for its creation. The effect of the manuscript is definitive for Scottish culture, emerging from a period of cultural uncertainty and political turmoil.
Since 2018 the urgent issues raised by the #metoo movement have found resonant, valuable parallels in medieval literature. The recent work of Carissa M. Harris on Obscene Pedagogies makes plain the necessary and informative connections that can be drawn between works from the past and the political landscape of our present. The poems of Bannatyne’s anthology expose the extent to which women’s sexual agency is identified with monstrosity and transgression. Its contents trace the exclusionary force of humour that depends on bonds between men formed through the sexual exploitation of women, and how this is rendered through collective reading, and the dissemination of texts in coteries.
This book will offer the first in-depth reading of the Bannatyne Manuscript as a misogynist text. Drawing oft-isolated themes together, such as Marian influence, the sexualised body and the inversion of courtliness, it establishes the importance of the debate about women as a central focus among social circles, enriching public entertainment at a time of growing suspicion towards it, undercut by the volatile reign of Mary Stuart and those who opposed her. The monograph considers the Manuscript’s marked preoccupation with women and the erotic in its approach to morality and humour, demonstrating the particular value and importance of the Bannatyne insights into the culture of sixteenth-century Scotland, and its interest for present-day readers.