Dr Jaclyn Rajsic, BA (McGill), MA (York), DPhil (Oxford)

Profile

I am a Canadian, a medievalist, and—in the words of my youngest daughter’s nursery class—a ‘protector of old books’.

I grew up in Ontario, surrounded by nature and inspired by stories about the ancient past. It was Arthurian literature that first made me want to become a medievalist, during my BA at McGill University in Montreal. I wanted to continue my studies in the place where many of the medieval texts I loved were written. To that end, I moved to the UK to complete an MA at the University of York's Centre for Medieval Studies. After a gap year, spent partly in Ontario and partly in Belgium (where I had the privilege of interning at Brepols Publishers), I returned to the UK to complete my DPhil at the University of Oxford on medieval legendary histories of Britain. I went on to work as a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant at Birmingham City University, where I helped to research and design The Bilingual Thesaurus of Everyday Life in Medieval England in the first year of the project. I was then very fortunate to work for a year at the University of Cambridge as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow. I became a Lecturer at Queen Mary in 2015.

I am interested in the ways in which legends rewrite history, and in how and why those legends evolve over time. Much of my work explores (re)imaginings of genealogy, geography, and history. I am also deeply interested in how medieval legends are reimagined for—and still speak to—our contemporary times. Increasingly, I am working to engage non-academic audiences in my research; this has been inspiring. I am currently working on two public engagement projects, ‘Legends of London’ and ‘Prophecies of Britain’, which are shaping the directions of my research. I enjoy sharing medieval legends with our littlest ones too, which is how I became a ‘protector of old books’.

You can follow me on Instagram @londonlegendsmedieval and on BlueSky @londonlegends.bsky.social

Undergraduate Teaching

Modules I have taught on recently:

• ESH129: Literatures in Time: Epic and Romance in the Middle Ages
• ESH295: London: Walking the City
• ESH5003: Chaucer: Gender, Faith, Identity
• ESH6000: English Research Dissertation
• ESH6063: Heroes and Outlaws in History and Fiction from 1100 to 1600

Postgraduate Teaching

I have taught on:

• ESH7001: The Production of Texts in Context
• ESH7055: Myths, Lineage and Power in Britain 1300-1780
• ESH7063: Writing in the Pre-Modern World

Research

Research Interests:

• Perceptions and reimaginings of the past
• Brut chronicles and related texts
• Genealogies and illustrated histories
• Arthurian literature
• Medieval romance
• Literature and legends of London
• Geography and maps
• European receptions of ‘English’ texts and manuscripts
• Medievalism

Recent and On-Going Research:

My first book, History Unrolled in Late Medieval England: Negotiating the British and English Pasts in Royal Genealogies, explores how writers shape and reshape Britain’s legendary history—especially the Arthurian past—in royal genealogical rolls written from the thirteenth to the early sixteenth century. It involved the study of well over 100 medieval manuscripts. History Unrolled puts royal genealogical rolls in conversation with Brut chronicles and universal histories to show how the authors of all these sources reimagined history, lineage, and time to fit competing accounts of England’s past together. Throughout, the book considers the different possibilities for the writing of history afforded by the roll and codex forms.

I continue to study the dozens of royal genealogical rolls that survive from late medieval England. At the same time, I am working on representations of England’s history in a group of royal genealogies produced in fifteenth-century France; some rolls were adapted and produced in England. So far, this work has appeared in articles and in chapter four of History Unrolled. I am deeply interested in the ‘afterlives’ of medieval royal genealogical rolls, particularly their collection and use by antiquarians and heralds, and in the new kinds of genealogies produced after the Middle Ages. I am especially interested in reading post-medieval rolls in terms of changing ideas about the legendary British and Arthurian pasts. I began to reflect on this in History Unrolled; my work continues in articles and in a planned book project.

My current book project, however, centres upon medieval legends of the city of London. This book, provisionally entitled Legends of London, was inspired by my work to develop a walking tour of medieval London for Being Human Festival, the UK’s national festival of the humanities. Like my earlier work, Legends of London explores how legends rewrite history. It is especially interested in accounts of migrations, both legendary and real.

Legends of London is one of my two current public engagement projects. The other is working to bring medieval prophecies of Merlin into UK secondary schools to think creatively about the future of Britain and the world. I would love to hear from secondary school teachers who might be interested in this work.

Publications

Books

Legends of London (working title, in progress)

History Unrolled in Late Medieval England: Negotiating the British and English Pasts in Royal Genealogies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming) [anticipated publication in late 2021 or early 2022]

with Tamara Atkin, ed., Manuscript and Print in Late Medieval and Early Tudor Britain: Essays in Honour of Professor Julia Boffey (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2019).

with Erik Kooper and Dominique Hoche, eds., The Prose Brut and other Late Medieval Chronicles: Books Have Their Histories; Essays in Memory of Lister M. Matheson (York, York Medieval Press, 2016).

Essays

'From Romance to History: Bevis of Hampton and Guy of Warwick in Medieval Chronicles of England', in Challenging Boundaries in Medieval Insular Romance, ed. Morgan Dickson and Fanny Moghaddassi (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, forthcoming).

'Heraldry in Royal Genealogical Rolls', in Heralds and Heraldry in Medieval England, ed. Nigel Ramsay (Donington: Shaun Tyas, forthcoming).

‘Performing History in Royal Genealogical Rolls’, in Performance, Ceremony and Display in Late Medieval England: Proceedings of the 2018 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Julia Boffey (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2020), pp. 316–32.

with Raluca Radulescu, ‘King Arthur in the Middle English Brut Chronicles and Royal Genealogies’, in La matière arthurienne tardive en Europe, 1270–1530; Late Arthurian Tradition in Europe, dir. Christine Ferlampin-Acher (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2020), pp. 1059–72.

‘The Brut: Legendary British History’, in Medieval Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500–1500, eds. Jennifer Jahner, Emily Steiner, and Elizabeth Tyler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 67–83.

‘Looking for Arthur in Short Histories and Genealogies of England's Kings’, The Review of English Studies, New Series, 68:285 (2017), 448-70.

‘“Cestuy roy dit que la couronne de Ffraunce luy appartenoit”: Reshaping the Prose Brut Chronicle in Fifteenth-Century France’, in The Plantagenet Empire, 1259–1453: Proceedings of the 2014 Harlaxton Medieval Symposium, eds. Peter Crooks, David Green, and W. Mark Ormrod (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2016), pp. 128-49.

‘The English Prose Brut Chronicle on a Roll: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 546 and its History’, in Books Have Their Histories, ed. Rajsic, Kooper, and Hoche (2016), pp. 105-24.

‘“Par ceste figure l’en poet savoer”: Two Genealogical Roll Chronicles’, in Vernacular Literary Theory from the French of Medieval England: Texts and Translations, c.1120–c.1450, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Thelma Fenster, and Delbert Russell (Cambridge, 2016), pp. 184–203.

‘“Eles arryverent la ou or est apellé lez Rennes de Galeway”: the Albina myth in Sir Thomas Gray’s Scalacronica’, in The Albina Casebook, eds. Christopher Baswell and Margaret Lamont (Broadview Press, forthcoming).

‘Jean de Wavrin’s Recueil des croniques et anchiennes istories de la Grant Bretaigne’, in The Albina Casebook, eds. Baswell and Lamont (forthcoming).

Encyclopedia entries:

‘Genealogy’, in The Encyclopaedia of Medieval British Literature, eds. Siân Echard and Robert Rouse (Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming 2017).

Supervision

I would welcome enquiries from potential PhD students interested in any aspect of my research, from medieval literature to medievalism. I am keen to support PhD students with any potential archival or public engagement work. I am currently supervising a PhD project on medieval Breton Lays and contemporary folk horror.

Public Engagement

In November 2025, I ran a walking tour on 'Legends of London' for Being Human Festival, the UK's national festival of the humanities. This work has inspired a book project about medieval legends of London. I will be reprising the walking tour in summer 2026.

I am also working on a new project, which brings medieval prophecies of Merlin into UK secondary schools. I ran an inspiring pilot in February 2026, which was generously supported by the Queen Mary Centre for Public Engagement. I am enjoying developing this work and am excited to see what the coming years will bring!

In past years, I have been interviewed for a French radio programme ('Accents d'Europe'), for a short segment on Albion, and by ZDF Studios for a TV documentary on King Arthur. I am happy to be contacted about future media interviews or appearances.

You can follow me on Instagram @londonlegendsmedieval and on BlueSky @londonlegends.bsky.social