In 2005-9 Manchester was a major partner in an AHRC-funded project, 'Poetic Knowledge in Late Medieval France'. Co-directed by Adrian Armstrong, Professor of Early French Culture, the project team aimed to reassess how verse conveyed and shaped knowledge between the late 13th and early 16th centuries. This meant revising 250 years of French literary history, as scholars have normally assumed that prose essentially superseded verse in this period. The team's findings are crystallized in a recently-published book, Knowing Poetry: Verse in Medieval France from the Rose to the Rhétoriqueurs (Cornell University Press). Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Professor of French at the University of Pittsburgh, describes the book's significance:
"Does verse convey a different kind of knowledge than prose in the later Middle Ages? Yes and no, according to the authors of this erudite and entertaining book. Verse can convey knowledge as profound as does prose, but it does so differently: verse links the quest for knowledge to orality, performance, and personifications and thus invites its readers to engage in a different kind of epistemology: 'verse’s ways of knowing.'"