A professor of English and medieval literature at Purdue University, Dorsey Armstrong has built a career on the gap between what the Middle Ages actually were and what popular memory insists they were. Born in 1970, she took her doctorate in medieval literature at Duke, taught at Centenary College of Louisiana and at California State University, Long Beach, and joined Purdue in 2002.
Her scholarship runs to medieval women writers, late medieval print culture and, above all, the Arthurian legend, the subject she has spent longest with and can least leave alone. She has edited the academic journal Arthuriana, and her published work includes studies of Malory and a modern English translation of the Morte Darthur.
What sets her apart on audio is that she is a genuinely funny lecturer. She corrects the record without condescending to it, and she is happy to tell you when the sources simply do not say, which happens far more often than the television documentaries admit.
5 hours and 6 minutes
