Professor Anthony Paul Bale FBA

Summary

Anthony Bale is Professor of Medieval & Renaissance English (1954) at the University of Cambridge and a Professorial Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge. He was educated at state schools in north Staffordshire and at Oxford University (MA, DPhil.), the University of York (MA), and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

His research explores later medieval English literature and culture, with particular interests in Christian-Jewish relations, popular religion, pilgrimage and travel, the history of emotions, and codicology. Throughout his work, he has been concerned with the margins of medieval society.

He has edited and translated a range of medieval texts and continues to focus on recovering overlooked voices from the past. He has collaborated on several exhibitions, including the 'Jewish Museum London’s Blood: Uniting and Dividing' and 'Jews, Money, Myth', and was an advisor for the British Library’s 'Medieval Women: In their Own Words (2024–25)'. From 2020 to 2022, he served as President of the New Chaucer Society.

His work has been supported by the British Academy, the AHRC, and the Leverhulme Trust, among others. He has held fellowships at institutions including Harvard University, the University of Michigan, the University of Melbourne, and the National Humanities Center, USA.

His study of medieval travel cultures, 'A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: The World through Medieval Eyes' (2023), has been translated into over a dozen languages. He holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2023–26) for a project on the Ottoman siege of Rhodes (1480) and the origins of late medieval news media.

Image credit: Tamsin Cox