Rebecca Menmuir

@rebeccamenmuir

Darby Fellow (Simon and June Li) in English Literature at Lincoln College, Ox. Interested in the medieval Ovid, forgeries, exile, Chaucer, Gower, medievalism.

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Rebecca Menmuir@rebeccamenmuir· 21d

Freiburg

Rebecca Menmuir@rebeccamenmuir· 22d

On Margate sands I can connect hair with ice cream

Rebecca Menmuir@rebeccamenmuir· Jul 15

I’ll never get tired of manicules. Emphasis on sleeves today.

Rebecca Menmuir@rebeccamenmuir· Jun 26

Sweltering in London for now but next week is the International Gower Congress in 💃🏼 Alicante 💃🏼 ! Can’t wait - speaking about Gower’s stubborn reception and a @lincoln.ox.ac.uk English student will speak on some original research on the Vox Clamantis

Rebecca Menmuir@rebeccamenmuir· Jun 18

An unusual initial today. @lincoln.ox.ac.uk lat. 59, Aulius Gellius.

Rebecca Menmuir@rebeccamenmuir· Jun 17

I love older scholarship. 1931, this.

Rebecca Menmuir@rebeccamenmuir· Jun 1

Just gorgeous - Jackie Morris’ ‘House Sparrows’ for the @bodleian.ox.ac.uk’s exhibition on birds. Our sparrows are especially cheeky this year!

Rebecca Menmuir@rebeccamenmuir· May 27

Big fan of whoever made this lore heavy wagtail meme at the very official birdaware.org/solent/which...

Rebecca Menmuir@rebeccamenmuir· May 27

Is it just me or does this wagtail look increasingly lost? Sir - you can fly

Rebecca Menmuir@rebeccamenmuir· May 19

A morning with some beautiful, if fragile, books at the @bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

Rebecca Menmuir@rebeccamenmuir· Apr 18

Or, the collected works of Thomas Hardy

Rebecca Menmuir@rebeccamenmuir· Apr 6

Something nice for your timeline today: a letter my uncle received - addressed to him, not his mother! - upon his birth. “Let me give my affectionate welcome into this world of trials and tribulations… I enclose your first financial acquisition”. At 3 days old! Bring this back 😂

Rebecca Menmuir@rebeccamenmuir· Apr 4

“Convent Thoughts”—reflecting on a passion flower—for Holy Saturday (Charles Allston Collins)

Rebecca Menmuir@rebeccamenmuir· Apr 1

Accidentally previewing the tulip festival at Hampton Court Palace

Rebecca Menmuir@rebeccamenmuir· Mar 26

Just garden things. Sound on.

Rebecca Menmuir@rebeccamenmuir· Mar 20

More magnolia action at St Mary le Strand 🌸

Rebecca Menmuir@rebeccamenmuir· Mar 18

A lovely day 🥰

Rebecca Menmuir@rebeccamenmuir· Mar 4

Thrilled to receive a review of my book, Medieval Responses to Ovid's Exile, in my inbox this morning! Ralph Hexter for The Medieval Review calls it an 'exemplary model of reception history'. 🤯

Menmuir, Rebecca. Medieval Responses to Ovid's Exile. Classics after Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025. Pp. xii, 250. $120.00. ISBN: 978-1-009-55392-6.
Reviewed by Ralph Hexter
University of California, Davis
hexter@ucdavis.edu

Medieval Responses to Ovid’s Exile is not merely a valuable contribution to the study of the medieval reception of the poetry Ovid wrote while relegated to Tomis on the Black Sea during the last decade of his life. It is itself an exemplary model of reception history. It balances breadth of coverage in Part I (“Responding to Exile”) with a focus on fourteenth-century England in Part II (“Becoming the Exile), indeed, on specific works by John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer considered against the backdrop of the troubled reign of Richard II. But it is not only in her analyses of the presence of the exiled Ovid in the works of the English poets where one finds specificity and new insights. Throughout, when Menmuir is...

Rebecca Menmuir@rebeccamenmuir· Feb 22

It was all happening yesterday: we passed film crews shooting the new Slow Horses, London Fashion Week, even protest marches. But like Bruno, we made it to our destination 😎

Rebecca Menmuir@rebeccamenmuir· Feb 22

Lincolnites in the big smoke! It was so fun to go on our Giordano Bruno walk on an almost sunny Saturday. @lincoln.ox.ac.uk

Rebecca Menmuir@rebeccamenmuir· Feb 15

Prepping for the next few weeks of classes, which are my favourite of all to teach. Prep includes listening to medieval carols and attempting to enjoy them more than this medieval owl (who - hoo! - is the topic of another class).

Rebecca Menmuir@rebeccamenmuir· Jan 30

I went down lots of rabbit holes on this one, but none so fun as chatting with @saracharles.bsky.social about hawthorn ink - which she then went and made/tested!

Excerpt from article:

I found him, for instance, one week-end, in his toolshed-scullery, boiling a brew of slimy
barks which were, if mixed with oak-galls, vitriol and wine, to become an ink-powder. We
boiled it till the Monday, and it turned into an adhesive stronger than birdlime, and entangled
us both. (p. 509)
Compare with Castorley describing the results of his test on the manuscript:
‘I took a wash, for analysis, from a blot in one corner … and I got the actual ink of the period! It’s
a practically eternal stuff compounded on – I’ve forgotten his name for the minute – the scribe at
Bury St Edmunds, of course! – hawthorn bark and wine. Anyhow, on his formula.’ (p. 511)

Rebecca Menmuir@rebeccamenmuir· Jan 16

CFP EXTENDED: Teaching with Ovid, an online pedagogy symposium. The new deadline for submissions is February 16th. To all those who have submitted abstracts for the original deadline: many thanks, and we will be in touch soon!

CALL FOR PAPERS
TEACHING WITH OVID

Friday 12th - Saturday 13th June 2026
Multiple time zones*
Online

The International Ovidian Society and the Societas Ovidiana welcome proposals for papers (15-20 mins), panels (1 hr), or roundtables (1hr) for an online pedagogy symposium.

We invite proposals on any aspect of teaching Ovid in the university or school classroom.

Proposals might consider, but are not limited to the topics of:

Classroom exercises based on Ovidian texts and themes (e.g. love; exile; epic; tragedy);
Teaching with Ovidian intermediaries (e.g. medieval moralised Ovids; early modern translations);
Using modern editions and/or translations in the classroom;
Ovidian retellings in the classroom;
Teaching with the material text, archives, or library resources;
Language teaching with Ovid (e.g. Latin; medieval languages);
Producing creative responses to Ovidian texts and ideas.

The CFP deadline is Monday 16th February 2026.

Please send abstracts of c. 200 words with a brief author bio to
rebecca.menmuir@lincoln.ox.ac.uk.

The symposium will be free to attend, but membership to the International Ovidian Society will be required. Visit https://ovidiansociety.org.

*All are welcome to submit an abstract regardless of time zone: we will try to accommodate suitable times across the symposium.

Rebecca Menmuir@rebeccamenmuir· Jan 15

Oxford's Middle English Reading Group will continue this term, reading more of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight! In-person on Thursdays. All are welcome - especially useful for undergraduates gearing up for Finals. Email me (rebecca.menmuir@lincoln.ox.ac.uk) for more details. @oxmedstud.bsky.social

Cotton Nero A.x: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight / the beheading game.

Rebecca Menmuir@rebeccamenmuir· Jan 13

Unbelievably proud of two @lincoln.ox.ac.uk undergraduate English students, Jess and Paul, whose research into @bodleian.ox.ac.uk manuscripts has been published today! Using quantitative codicology, they seek to find the Bodleian's most 'average' manuscript... bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/campuspress....

Median Aevum: Uncovering Wycliffite Manuscript
‘Standardisation’ with Quantitative Codicology
By Paul Cooley and Jessica Hind
The study of medieval manuscripts has, in recent years, incorporated more quantitative and statistical methods. This approach, known as quantitative codicology, can highlight trends in large manuscript collections that are difficult to identify without digital processing. A digital project within the Bodleian Libraries, Enabling Digital Research on Manuscript Catalogue Data, makes medieval manuscript catalogues newly accessible as tabular data. This study utilises the work of
this project to approach the 11,000-strong collection of medieval manuscripts in Oxford libraries, including the Bodleian and college libraries. We identify a group of statistically average medieval
manuscripts – those that possess the modal average of seven criteria and could therefore be said to represent an average category. We begin by justifying each of our seven criteria for assessment.
Our results, however, return an unexpected pattern: an unusually large proportion of Wycliffite manuscripts is represented in the data, which, via binomial distribution, proves statistically significant. Thus, we suggest that quantitative approaches to codicology may support the notion, otherwise difficult to qualify, of a ‘standardised’Wycliffite manuscript type. While we consider the pitfalls of a quantitative approach, we suggest overall that statistical study can offer insights into the big data associated with large collections – in this instance, putting forward a tentative case for a ‘standardised’Wycliffite scheme.

Rebecca Menmuir@rebeccamenmuir· Dec 30

Kim, my grandmother’s dog, pictured on Christmas Day 1959. Famous in our family for his ability to see ghosts. Looks like he was seeing one as the photo was taken.

Rebecca Menmuir@rebeccamenmuir· Dec 20

Sound on 🥰

Rebecca Menmuir@rebeccamenmuir· Dec 20

One of those mornings

Rebecca Menmuir@rebeccamenmuir· Dec 19

Meta! A reference to Tolkien’s Year’s Work reviews on Chaucer in a book I’ve just reviewed for the Year’s Work review on Chaucer. (Bowers and Steffensen’s Tolkien On Chaucer, 2024).

Rebecca Menmuir@rebeccamenmuir· Dec 3

What’s better than the sun rising and last tufts of mist lifting while you walk?