Professor Vincent Gillespie FBA

Medieval literary theory and the psychology of literary response; poetic identity in the Middle Ages; Nietzschean slow reading; medieval religious writing ("vernacular theology"); Syon Abbey; history of the book

Fellow type: UK Fellow
Year elected: 2013
Year of death: 2025
Subjects: Medieval studies
Sections: Medieval Studies
Website: http://www.lmh.ox.ac.uk/Tutors/Fellows/Profiles/Prof--Vincent-Gillespie.aspx

Summary

At the core of most of what I do is a curiosity about the psychology of literary response: the ways in which writers struggle to express experiences and acts of imagination, the strategies they use to articulate their understanding of these experiences and imaginative acts, and the codes and conventions that develop between texts and readers to allow communication and understanding to develop and to be manipulated. What the Arabs called 'the imaginative syllogism' drives my interest in medieval poetic (as sharply distinguished from rhetorical) theory as it can be recovered from commentaries and theoretical writings from the twelfth through to the sixteenth centuries.

Last post

University of Oxford Emeritus J R R Tolkien Professor of English

Publications

Syon Abbey, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues 9 British Library, 2001

Looking in Holy Books: Essays on Late Medieval Religious Writing in England Brepols, 2012

After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh Brepols, 2011

Probable Truth: Editing Medieval Texts from Britain in the Twenty-First Century (Brepols 2013)

Ed. Vincent Gillespie and Anne Hudson

‘Fatherless Books: Authorship, Attribution and Orthodoxy in Later Medieval England,’

Ed Ian Johnson and Allan Westphall Brepols, 2013 - Published in 2013 by Brepols

In The Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ: Exploring the Middle English Tradition

'The Study of Classical and Secular Authors from the Twelfth Century to c.1450'

ed. A.J. Minnis and Ian Johnson - Published in 2005 by CUP

In The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, II: The Medieval Period

Other Fellows of the British Academy

Professor Hugh Kennedy FBA

The History and Archaeology of the early Islamic Middle-East, North Africa and Spain c.600-1000 AD

Professor Sylvia Huot FBA

Medieval French literature & manuscripts, particularly the 'Roman de la Rose', courtly allegory & prose romance.

Professor Michael Lapidge FBA

Medieval Latin Language and Literature; Anglo-Saxon Literature

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