Brian Stock (born June 8, 1939) is an American historian. He is a historian of modes of perception between the ancient world and the sixteenth century. He was Rouse Ball Student at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Senior Fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, before joining the graduate faculty of the University of Toronto, where he taught history and literature until 2007. [1] He is a Canadian and French citizen.
Educated in Canada, Stock completed his A.B., summa cum laude, at Harvard College in 1962 and his Ph.D. at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1967. He carried out post-doctoral studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris and the University of Rome, La Sapienza.
He was elected a Junior Fellow of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, in 1966-67 and a Senior Fellow in 1972 (with a cross-appointment as full professor at the University of Toronto). He subsequently taught at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He was elected to a visiting professorship at the Collège de France in 1987 and to the Chaire Internationale in that institution in 1996.
He delivered the A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography at the University of Pennsylvania in 1999. [2] He was elected the Sather Professor of Classical Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2001. He delivered the Jerusalem Lectures of the Historical Society of Israel in 2005.
He has been a visiting university professor at several institutions and presently holds that position at the Central European University (Budapest). He has been visiting Mellon Professor of Classics at Brown University, where a colloquium on The Implications of Literacy was held in 1986 under the auspices of the NEH. An international conference on his publications was held in Toronto in 2019. He is presently Senior Research Fellow at Victoria College, University of Toronto and holds the chair of criticism at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome, which awarded him the prestigious International Feltrinelli Prize in 2007.
He has one daughter, Maxime Pineau-Valencienne, and two grandchildren, Marie-Capucine and Thomas.
International Feltrinelli Prize, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome, 2007
Brian Stock’s scholarship engages the history of science, the history of literacy, and the history of reading.
His 1972 monograph, Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century, examined the work of the twelfth-century Latin poet, Bernard Silvester, in particular his poem, the Cosmographia, which represents a synthesis of literary and empirical approaches to the study of nature. Stock demonstrates that Silvester’s work holds aesthetic and rational approaches to nature in tension and thereby participates the twelfth-century’s renewed interest in theories of creation.
The Implications of Literacy (1983) studied the social effects of the growth of manuscript culture that took place in the Latin West during the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. In this work Stock coined the term “textual community” to refer to social groups that form around the interpretation of a text. The concept has since been widely applied in social history, anthropology, literary studies, and digital humanities.
His 1996 book, Augustine the Reader, developed a theory of reading from Augustine, connecting it to important aspects of Augustine’s philosophy and spirituality. The book establishes Augustine as the founder of the theory of reading in the West. This was the first of several studies addressing Augustine’s thought and influence. Stock’s After Augustine (2001) examined how Augustine’s theories of reading and narrative continued to shape literary culture in the medieval and early modern periods. His monograph Augustine’s Inner Dialogue (2010) analyzed the ways that Augustine transformed the philosophical dialogue into a literary form and a technique of self-analysis. Finally, The Integrated Self (2017) featured a sequence of essays exploring how the post-conversion Augustine harmonizes classical philosophy with Christian practices of sacred reading
In addition to these studies, Stock has published numerous essays and several volumes of literary criticism dealing with modes of thought and perception between the ancient and early modern worlds. Listening for the Text (1990) developed theoretical frameworks for discussing changes in forms of communication and knowledge transfer that occurred during the medieval period. The book has been translated into Italian (La voce del testo, Rome, 1995). More recently he has published on the therapeutic effects of meditation and reading in the journal, New Literary History.
In English: [3]
In French:
With Charles Halpern, Stock was one of the organizers of the Center for Contemplative Mind and for two years he chaired the committee for the Contemplative Practice Fellowships of the American Council of Learned Societies.
He was appointed to a six-year term as member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study in 1991. He has served on executive committees of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris and was a member of the planning committee that founded the Institut d’Études Avancées de Paris. He is member of the advisory board of New Literary History and serves on the Comité scientifique of the Revue des Études Augustiniennes, Paris. Stock is editor of the Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa.
Alain de Lille was a French theologian and poet. He was born in Lille, some time before 1128. His exact date of death remains unclear as well, with most research pointing toward it being between 14 April 1202, and 5 April 1203. He is known for writing a number of works on that are based upon the teachings of the liberal arts, with one of his most renowned poems, De planctu Naturae, focusing on human nature in regard to sexual conduct. Although, Alain was widely known during his lifetime, there is not a great deal known about his personal life, with the majority of our knowledge of the theologian coming from the content of his works.
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The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (PIMS) is a research institute in the University of Toronto that is dedicated to advanced studies in the culture of the Middle Ages.
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The Four Books of Sentences is a compendium of theology written by Peter Lombard around 1150.
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Étienne Henri Gilson was a French philosopher and historian of philosophy. A scholar of medieval philosophy, he originally specialised in the thought of Descartes; he also philosophized in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas, although he did not consider himself a neo-Thomist philosopher. In 1946 he attained the distinction of being elected an "Immortal" (member) of the Académie française. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Henry of Huntingdon, the son of a canon in the diocese of Lincoln, was a 12th-century English historian and the author of Historia Anglorum, as "the most important Anglo-Norman historian to emerge from the secular clergy". He served as archdeacon of Huntingdon. The few details of Henry's life that are known originated from his own works and from a number of official records. He was brought up in the wealthy court of Robert Bloet of Lincoln, who became his patron.
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Christian views on the classics have varied throughout history. In the early years of Christianity, the writings of Classical and Hellenistic authors were widely spread by Christian teachers. However, during the Dark Ages, the decline in the study of this literature as a whole, as well as the waning of Christianity's popularity throughout Europe, resulted in the extinction of its effect in Christian life until the spread of Islam—the reintroduction of Classical texts—and the "rebirth" of Ancient Greek and Roman philosophies and arts during the Renaissance, where "artists and philosophers, each in their own way, combined Christian belief and ancient philosophy into a balanced, rational, humanistic system". Today, churches' views are generally consistent with those of Renaissance humanists' in that "Christians should be able to read the classics ... because it is part of the Western heritage ... [and] because it is part of Christianity’s inheritance."
Patrick Osmund Lewry (1929–1987) was an English Dominican who made significant contributions to the history of logic and the philosophy of language in the thirteenth century. Lewry studied mathematical logic under Lejewski and A.N. Prior at Manchester (1961–2). From 1962–7 he taught the philosophy of language and logic at Hawkesyard. He was assigned to the Oxford Blackfriars in 1967. Dissatisfaction with teaching led him to work for an Oxford D.Phil. on the logic teaching of Robert Kilwardby. In 1979 he began the study of the history of grammar, logic and rhetoric at Oxford in the period 1220–1320. In 1979 he went to the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto first as a research associate, then as a senior fellow. He died on 23 April 1987 at the age of 57 at the Oxford Dominican House.
The Gesta Adalberonis or Gesta Alberonis is a biography of Adalbero, Archbishop of Trier (1131–52), written in medieval Latin prose by Balderic of Florennes. There is also a Gesta Alberonis metrica anonyma, an anonymous biography of Albero's life down to 1145, written in hexameters.
Carolyn Anne Muessig holds the Chair of Christian Studies at the University of Calgary. A graduate of Fulton-Montgomery Community College, State University of New York at Buffalo, the University of Toronto, the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, and the Université de Montréal, Muessig is a specialist in the history of medieval preaching, Jacques de Vitry, Francis of Assisi, Catherine of Siena and female educators of the Middle Ages. Prior to moving to Calgary, she was Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Bristol. She was co-editor of Medieval Sermon Studies for 17 years and since 2001 she has been series co-editor with George Ferzoco of Routledge Studies in Medieval Religion and Culture.
John Alexander MarenbonFBA is a British philosopher and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. His principal area of specialization is medieval philosophy.
William de Montibus was a theologian and teacher. He travelled to Paris in the 1160s, where he studied under Peter Comestor, eventually opening his own school on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. He was appointed by Hugh of Lincoln as master of the cathedral school in Lincoln, England in the 1180s, where his lectures drew students from around the country. He was also chancellor of the cathedral by 1194, and remained in both positions until his death in 1213. He was the instructor of Alexander Neckam in Paris, and in Lincoln taught Samuel Presbiter and Richard of Wetheringsett.
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.
Richard John Parish (1948-2022) was a scholar of French literature. He was Professor of French at the University of Oxford between 1996 and 2015.
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