Jenny Adams

Jenny Adams, Professor, holds a Ph.D. and an A.M. in English Literature from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in English Literature and French Language and Literature from UCLA. Her current research focuses on academic debt and university life in late medieval England. To this end she is completing a monograph provisionally titled “Degrees of Collateral: Books, Borrowing, and the Business of Medieval Oxford.” She has articles on this topic in the Journal of the Early Book Society, The Library, New College Notes, and Writers, Editors, and Exemplars in Medieval Texts (Palgrave, ed. Sharon Rowley). Her work also appears in a short, popular piece, “The History of Student Loans Goes Back to the Middle Ages” which she wrote for The Conversation.

Her past research has been on chess and political organization in the late Middle Ages. Her publications on this subject include her book, Power Play: The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Late Middle Ages (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); her edition of William Caxton’s The Game and Playe of the Chesse (TEAMS Middle English Texts series, 2009); and articles in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, the Journal of English Germanic Philology (JEGP), and The Chaucer Review. Although she does not write much on chess in popular culture, she did have something to say about the series The Queen’s Gambit. With Nancy Bradbury (Smith College) she edited an essay collection titled Medieval Women and Their Objects (University of Michigan Press, 2017).  

She has won fellowships from the Bodleian Library (Oxford), the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Newberry Library, and the Mellon Foundation. She has taught a wide variety of courses including Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Arthurian Legends, Major British Authors, Medieval Dream Poetry, Medieval Travel Narratives, Utopian/Dystopias, and Old English.

Books

Degrees of Collateral: Books, Borrowing, and the Business of Medieval Oxford (monograph under contract at Penn Press)

Medieval Woman and Their Objects. Eds. Jenny Adams and Nancy Bradbury. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017.

William Caxton’s The Game and Playe of the Chesse. Ed. Jenny Adams. TEAMS Middle English Text Series.  Kalamazoo, MI:  Medieval Institute Publications, 2009.

Power Play: The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Late Middle Ages.  Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

Articles

“Gloria Naylor’s California” in Women's Restorative Medievalisms, eds. Suzanne Edwards and Matthew X. Vernon (Arc Humanities Press, forthcoming)

“Chaucer’s Thynges” in The Routledge Companion to Global Chaucer, eds. Craig Bertolet and Susan Nakley (New York, NY:  Routledge, 2024): Chapter 33.

“Academic Loans and Scholarly Networks in Late Medieval Oxford.” Journal of the Early Book Society 26. (January, 2024): 133-60.

“Thomas Hunt’s Monograms.”  The Library 22.2 (September 2021): 376-82.

“On Chaucer’s Clerk, His Books, and the Value of Education” in ed. Sharon Rowley, Writers, Editors, and Exemplars in Medieval Texts. (New York: Palgrave, 2021): 79-88.

“In the ‘Queen’s Gambit’ and Beyond, Chess Holds up a Mirror to Life.” The Conversation (December 8, 2020).  Republished in Salon.

 “A Book with a Price in the World: New College MS 274,” New College Notes 11 (2019): 1-6.

“Could College Textbooks Soon Get Cheaper?” The Conversation (August 23, 2018).

“Trans(Gender) and the Chess Queen in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess.” Medieval Woman and Their Objects.  Eds. Jenny Adams and Nancy Bradbury.  (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017): 248-66.

“The History of Student Loans Goes Back to the Middle Ages.” The Conversation (March 23, 2016). Electronic.  Republished in Time, on-line edition.