Susan Phillips
Associate Professor of English
University Hall Room 315
Telephone: (847) 491-3368
Fax: (847) 467-1545
E-mail: susie-phillips@northwestern.edu
A medievalist with Early Modern leanings, Susie Phillips (Ph.D. Harvard University) teaches courses on late medieval and Early Modern book culture, medieval literature and culture (sin and confession, heresy, rebellion, courtly love), Shakespeare, and Chaucer. In her scholarship as well as her teaching, she is interested in the materiality of the book, that is, in exploring how texts were produced, published, circulated, and read. Her book, Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England (Penn State 2007) explores the religious, cultural, and literary work of "idle talk" in late medieval England. Gossip's supposedly idle words, she argues, are transformative. They blur the boundaries between people, discourses, genres, practices, and words. Gossip has the power to alter discourses--changing idle talk into confession and confession into idle talk. It can alter genre--making fabliaux read like exempla in Chaucer's poems, or turning sermon exempla into news in sermon collections and penitential manuals. And most striking of all, it can change social relationships in fundamental ways--turning neighbors into sisters and confessors into lovers.
Her current project traces the cultural history of the dictionaries, phrasebooks, and guides to conversations that flooded the early modern marketplace. These bestsellers stand at the intersection of the textual, the social, and the historical. Records of spoken language, these little books are both prescriptive and descriptive, reflecting and indeed shaping cultural practice, as they teach readers not only how to conjugate verbs or negotiate with foreign merchants, but also how to insult neighbors and chat up chambermaids in eight different languages.
Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England
