Bryant White is a Ph.D. candidate whose research looks at medieval comic literature, with an emphasis on satire and parody. His narrower focus is on the development of religious parody (parodia sacra) in vernacular throughout the Middle Ages, looking especially at its proliferation in several genres of late medieval secular drama in France, including farces, sotties, and sermons joyeux. In a dissertation tentatively entitled “Dictes amen devottement: Late Medieval Religious Parody in Context”, he will examine how this plays into the larger social and religious context of the Late Middle Ages.
Bryant finished a B.A. in French at the University of Rhode Island in 2011, after which he spent six months in Fontenay-le-Comte, France as an English teaching assistant in conjunction with the TAPIF program. Back in the States, Bryant taught French courses at the Alliance Française in Providence, RI and also worked as an assistant at the French-American School of RI until 2016. From 2016 to 2018 he studied at Boston College and received an M.A. in French after having completed a final research project on Blaise Pascal’s reception and representation of Calvinist theology in the Écrits sur la grâce.