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Alastair J. Minnis (born 1948) is a Northern Irish literary critic and historian of ideas who has written extensively about medieval literature, and contributed substantially to the study of late-medieval theology and philosophy. Having gained a first-class B.A. degree at the Queen's University of Belfast, he matriculated at Keble College, Oxford as a visiting graduate student, where he completed work on his Belfast Ph.D. (awarded 1975), having been mentored by M.B. Parkes and Beryl Smalley. Following appointments at the Queen's University of Belfast (Lecturer, 1972–81) and Bristol University (Lecturer, later Reader, 1981–87), he was appointed Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of York; also Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies and later Head of English & Related Literature. From 2003 to 2006, he was a Humanities Distinguished Professor at Ohio State University, Columbus, from where he moved to Yale University. In 2008, he was named Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of English at Yale. [1]
Minnis is a Fellow of the English Association (2000), a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America (2001), [2] and an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy (2016). [3] From 2012 to 2014, he served as president of the New Chaucer Society. [4] He was general editor of the Cambridge University Press series Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature from 1987 to 2018 and holds an honorary master's degree from Yale (2007) and an honorary doctorate from the University of York (2018). The University of York also bestowed on him the honorific title of Emeritus Professor of Medieval Literature (2018). [5] [6] He has long been involved in the activities of the John Gower Society and currently holds the post of vice president. [7] In 2023, he received a festschrift edited by Andrew Kraebel, Ardis Butterfield, and Ian Johnson. [8]
William of Malmesbury was the foremost English historian of the 12th century. He has been ranked among the most talented English historians since Bede. Modern historian C. Warren Hollister described him as "a gifted historical scholar and an omnivorous reader, impressively well versed in the literature of classical, patristic, and earlier medieval times as well as in the writings of his own contemporaries. Indeed William may well have been the most learned man in twelfth-century Western Europe."
John Gower was an English poet, a contemporary of William Langland and the Pearl Poet, and a personal friend of Geoffrey Chaucer. He is remembered primarily for three major works—the Mirour de l'Omme, Vox Clamantis, and Confessio Amantis—three long poems written in French, Latin, and English respectively, which are united by common moral and political themes.
Medieval studies is the academic interdisciplinary study of the Middle Ages. A historian who studies medieval studies is called a medievalist.
Troilus and Criseyde is an epic poem by Geoffrey Chaucer which re-tells in Middle English the tragic story of the lovers Troilus and Criseyde set against a backdrop of war during the siege of Troy. It was written in rime royale and probably completed during the mid-1380s. Many Chaucer scholars regard it as the poet's finest work. As a finished long poem, it is more self-contained than the better known but ultimately unfinished The Canterbury Tales. This poem is often considered the source of the phrase: "all good things must come to an end" (3.615).
Derek Stanley Brewer was a Welsh medieval scholar, author and publisher.
Margaret Beryl Clunies Ross is a medievalist who was until her retirement in 2009 the McCaughey Professor of English Language and Early English Literature and Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Sydney. Her main research areas are Old Norse-Icelandic Studies and the history of their study. Since 1997 she has led the project of editing a new edition of the corpus of skaldic poetry. She has also written articles on Australian Aboriginal rituals and contributed to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Amoryus and Cleopes is a poem written in 1449 by John Metham; it was an early English adaptation of the Pyramus and Thisbe narrative from Book 4 of Ovid‘s Metamorphoses.
Malcolm Beckwith Parkes, credited as an author as M. B. Parkes, was an English paleographer, notable for his contributions to the scholarship of medieval manuscripts. His studies of the manuscripts of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland were especially important, and his 1978 article "The Production of Copies of the 'Canterbury Tales'" was described as "seminal".
Richard J. Utz is a German-born medievalist who has spent much of his career in North America. He specializes in medieval studies, and served as president of the International Society for the Study of Medievalism (2009–2020).
Carolyn Dinshaw is an American academic and author, who has specialised in issues of gender and sexuality in the medieval context.
Wendy Scase is the Geoffrey Shepherd Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Birmingham. She is currently researching the material histories of English medieval literature, studying a range of material from one-sheet texts to the largest surviving Middle English manuscript.
Nicholas Watson is an English-Canadian medievalist, literary critic, religious historian, and author. He is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English at Harvard University and chair of the Harvard English Department.
Helen Barr is an academic specialising in English literature on the late medieval period. She has spent her entire career at the University of Oxford, and, in 2016, the university awarded her the title of Professor of English Literature.
David Lyle Jeffrey is a Canadian-American scholar of literature and religion, currently a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Baylor Institute for Studies in Religion. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (1996-). In 2003 he was given the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Conference of Christianity and Literature.
Sebastian Sobecki is a medievalist specialising in English literature, history, and manuscript studies.
Norman Francis Blake was a British academic and scholar specialising in Middle English and Early Modern English language and literature on which he published abundantly during his career.
Cyril William Edwards was a British medievalist and translator. Teaching in London and Oxford, he published extensively on the medieval German lyric and Old High German literature, and translated four of the major Middle High German verse narratives.
Christopher Cannon is a medievalist at Johns Hopkins University. He is currently Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of English and Classics, previously Chair of Classics, and from 2020-2024 Vice Dean for the Humanities and Social Sciences in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. His research and writings have focused on the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, early Middle English, and elementary learning in the Middle Ages.
Thorlac Francis Samuel Turville-Petre is an English philologist who is Professor Emeritus and former head of the School of English at the University of Nottingham. He specializes in the study of Middle English literature.
Marion Turner is the J R R Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language at the University of Oxford and an academic authority on Geoffrey Chaucer. She has authored several books, including Chaucer: A European Life, which was shortlisted in 2020 for the Wolfson History Prize, and was a finalist in the PROSE Awards, and for which she was awarded the 2020 Rose Mary Crawshay Prize.