Professor Vincent Gillespie

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

Elected 2013

Year elected: 2013
Subjects: Medieval studies
Website: http://www.lmh.ox.ac.uk/Tutors/Fellows/Profiles/Prof--Vincent-Gillespie.aspx

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.

Current post

J R R Tolkien Professor of English, University of Oxford

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, ed. Vincent Gillespie and Anne Hudson Brepols, 2013

‘Fatherless Books: Authorship, Attribution and Orthodoxy in Later Medieval England,’ in The Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ: Exploring the Middle English Tradition, ed. Ian Johnson and Allan Westphall Brepols, 2013

'The Study of Classical and Secular Authors from the Twelfth Century to c.1450,' in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, II: The Medieval Period, ed. A.J. Minnis and Ian Johnson, pp. 145-235. CUP, 2005

Related Fellows

Professor Hugh Kennedy

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

Professor Bruce Campbell

The economic history of late-medieval Britain and Ireland, with particular reference to human-environment interactions during the 14th century and trends in agricultural output and productivity from the 13th to 19th centuries

Professor Anna Sapir Abulafia FBA

Interactions between Christians and Jews in the Middle Ages within the broad context of 12th and 13th-century theological and ecclesiastical developments; the place of Jews and Muslims in canon law