M.G. (Megan) Leitch, Prof

Megan Leitch is the Professor and Chair of Medieval English Literature and Culture at the University of Groningen. Prior to joining the University of Groningen in August 2024, she was Reader in English Literature at Cardiff University in Wales, where she worked for 12 years. She holds a BA (Hons) in English Literature from the University of British Columbia, and an MPhil and PhD from the University of Cambridge.

Prof Leitch is co-editor of the journal Arthurian Literature and past president of the International Arthurian Society British Branch. She has received research funding from the Leverhulme Trust, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW) and the Welsh Crucible, and has been a Visiting Fellow at St Catherine's College, University of Oxford.

Her research illuminates Middle English literature within wider frameworks by making connections across languages, periods and disciplines, and between genres that are not often studied together, such as popular romance and courtly dream visions. Her work is concerned with questions of embodiment and intertextuality, and it connects cultural studies with the history of the book via literature’s intersections with medicine and science, law, and gender studies and the history of the emotions.

Her second monograph, Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature: Emotions, ethics, dreams (Manchester University Press, 2021; paperback, 2023), explores how the subject of sleep interlaces medical, moral, and imaginative discourses in the Middle Ages. The book’s contributions include analysing how sleep shapes the ethical codes and emotive scripts of Middle English romance, fabliau, drama, and dream visions; establishing sleep’s significance for medieval approaches to mental health; and offering a new understanding of Chaucer’s dream visions by exploring their hitherto-neglected engagements with Aristotelian dream theories and English traditions.

She has also recently co-edited Cultural Translations in Medieval Romance (with Victoria Flood; Boydell & Brewer, January 2022), a collection of essays that has emerged from the 16th Biennial Medieval Insular Romance conference, which she hosted at Cardiff in 2018, and that positions a set of inter-related issues about ‘translation’ (across generic, geographic, and social boundaries as well as linguistic ones) as crucial for our understanding of the evolution of medieval romance from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries.

She is now working on a new monograph, The Medieval Middlebrow: Romance and the Body Politic, 1300-1534, for which she has been awarded a 2023 Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship. This book project explores the democratization of literary culture in later medieval England by both investigating middle-class book ownership and analysing middle-class characters' interventions in romance narratives, and it takes an intersectional approach to the politics of gender, class, race, religion, and dis/ability. She is also editing Volume II (The Middle Ages) of Bloomsbury's six-volume A Cultural History of Sleep and Dreaming (under contract, 2025).

Previous books include:

• Romancing Treason: The Literature of the Wars of the Roses (Oxford University Press, 2015)
• Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance, co-edited with Elizabeth Archibald and Corinne Saunders (D. S. Brewer, 2018)
• A New Companion to Malory, co-edited with Cory James Rushton (D. S. Brewer, 2019)

She has published articles on Arthurian literature, medieval romance, and Chaucer in various edited books and in journals including Arthuriana, Arthurian Literature, The Chaucer Review, Medium Aevum, and Parergon (for full details, see Publications below).

Her current and recent PhD students have worked on topics including medieval Arthurian literature (including English, French, Welsh, Cornish, and Breton traditions); medieval romance; gender in Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate; medieval historiography; and medieval queens in early modern drama. She welcomes applications from prospective postgraduate students planning research in these areas or in the other areas listed under her research interests. Informal enquiries are always welcome.

PUBLICATIONS

Monographs

Sleep and its Spaces in Middle English literature: Emotions, Ethics, Dreams (Manchester University Press, 2021; paperback, 2023)

Romancing Treason: The Literature of the Wars of the Roses (Oxford University Press, 2015)

Edited Books

A Cultural History of Sleep and Dreaming in the Middle Ages, ed. by Megan G. Leitch (Bloomsbury: under contract, 2025)

Arthurian Literature, vols 36-40 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2021-25), co-edited with K. S. Whetter

Cultural Translations in Medieval Romance, ed. by Victoria Flood and Megan G. Leitch (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2022)

A New Companion to Malory, ed. by Megan G. Leitch and Cory J. Rushton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019)

Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance, ed. by Elizabeth Archibald, Megan G. Leitch, and Corinne Saunders (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018)

Journal Articles

‘The Artistry of Malory’s Mercantile Metaphors: Goods, Generosity, and the Source of “The Tale of Sir Gareth”’, Arthurian Literature, 37 (2022), 23-48

‘The Servants of Chivalry? Dwarves and Porters in Malory and the Middle English Gawain Romances’, Arthuriana, 27.1 (2017), 3-27

‘“grete luste to slepe”: Somatic Ethics and the Sleep of Romance from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to Shakespeare’, Parergon, 32.1 (2015), 103-28

‘“suche maner of sorow-makynge”: Affect, Ethics and Unconsciousness in Malory's Morte Darthur’, Arthurian Literature, XXXI (2014), 83-99

‘Thinking Twice about Treason in Caxton’s Prose Romances: Proper Chivalric Conduct and the English Printing Press’, Medium Aevum, LXXXI.1 (July 2012), 41-69

‘Locating Authorial Ethics: The Idea of the ‘Male’ or Book-bag in the Canterbury Tales and Other Middle English Poems’, The Chaucer Review, 46.4 (April 2012), 403-18

‘(Dis)Figuring Transgressive Desire: Blood, Sex, and Stained Sheets in Malory’s Morte Darthur’, Arthurian Literature, XXVIII (2011), 21-38

‘Speaking (of) Treason in Malory’s Morte Darthur’, Arthurian Literature, XXVII (2010), 103-34

Chapters in Books

‘Prose Romance’, in The Oxford Handbook of Middle English Prose, ed. by Sebastian Sobecki and Emily Steiner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 2025)

‘Merchants in Shining Armour: Chivalrous Interventions and Social Mobility in Late Middle English Romance’, in Cultural Translations in Medieval Romance, ed. by Victoria Flood and Megan G. Leitch (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2022), pp. 245-62                                                    

‘From Sorceresses to Scholars: Universities and the Disenchantment of Romance’, in Medieval Romance, Arthurian Literature: Essays in Honour of Elizabeth Archibald, ed. by A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2021), pp. 16-33

‘Malory in Literary Context’, in New Companion to Malory, ed. by Megan G. Leitch and Cory J. Rushton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019), pp. 79-95

‘Chivalric Literature’ (with Joanna Bellis), in Companion to Chivalry, ed. by Robert Jones and Peter Coss (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019), pp. 241-62

‘Middle English Romance: The Motifs and the Critics’, in Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance, ed. by Elizabeth Archibald, Megan G. Leitch, and Corinne Saunders (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018), pp. 1-24

‘“of his ffader spak he no thing”: Family Resemblance and Anxiety of Influence in the Prose Romances’, in Medieval Into Renaissance, ed. by Andrew King and Matthew Woodcock (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016), pp. 55-72

‘Ritual, Revenge and the Politics of Chess in Medieval Romance’, in Medieval Romance and Material Culture, ed. by Nicholas Perkins (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2015), pp. 129-46

‘Enter the Bedroom: Managing Space for the Erotic in Middle English Romance’, in Sexual Culture in Late Medieval Britain, ed. by Amanda Hopkins, Robert Allen Rouse and Cory James Rushton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), pp. 39-53

Encyclopedia Entries

‘Traitors’, in The Chaucer Encyclopedia (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2023)

‘Mordred’, ‘Prose Romance’, and ‘The Squire of Low Degree’, in The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017)

Open Access Public Scholarship

‘Sleeping it off: Sleep, Medicine, and Mental Health in Premodern England’ (Durham: The Polyphony, 2019)