Margaret Bridges

One retires from teaching and administrative duties, but not from scholarship, which continues in a variety of forms, of which publications are the most visible product. Most of my recent publications can be consulted on BORIS: https://boris.unibe.ch. They reflect the wide range of my research interests, from Old English to early Modern English literature in a European context and, most recently, in the context of global Alexander (the Great) studies. Recurring emphases have been on figurations of cartographic and literary space in historiography (e.g. the Polychronicon) and in medieval narratives of travel (from founding legends to Mandeville and Margery Kempe), with a focus on gender and on configurations of writing (converging in the space of the bed, in narratives of female suicide and of theogamy, but also as a premodern locus of writing). My most recent project – which is now in its final stages - consists of a verse translation of the roughly 20’000 extant decasyllabic couplets of Gilbert Hay’s fifteenth-century compendious, inventive biography of Alexander the Great; his Scots Buik has been transcribed (but not yet edited) and deserves a wider readership than it currently enjoys. At the time of writing this (January 2024), I have completed well over 17’000 verses: only two thousand more to go!