- Fellow type
- UK Fellow
- Year of death
- 2025
- Year elected
- 2013
- Sections
- Medieval Studies
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
