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. [1] [2]
Nicholas Watson was raised in Winchester, England. [3] After an undergraduate education at the University of Cambridge and graduate work with Vincent Gillespie at Oxford, he began his scholarly career with a 1987 dissertation at the University of Toronto on the Yorkshire hermit Richard Rolle. [3] Watson is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English at Harvard; before joining the faculty at Harvard he taught at the University of Western Ontario from 1990 to 2001. [4]
Watson has written on vernacularity, gender, religious censorship, ritual magic, and mystical literature; he has also edited and translated important works from medieval Latin and Middle English. He is credited with introducing the concept of "vernacular theology" to literary and religious studies. [5] His scholarship has explored figures such as Julian of Norwich, William Langland, Marguerite Porete, Geoffrey Chaucer, John of Morigny, Richard Rolle, the Pearl Poet, and Archbishop Thomas Arundel. [3]
In 1990 he was awarded the John Charles Polanyi Prize. [6] His research has been supported by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Guggenheim Foundation, [7] the American Council of Learned Societies, [8] and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. [9] In 2016 he was named a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.
Julian of Norwich, also known as Juliana of Norwich, the Lady Julian, Dame Julian or Mother Julian, was an English anchoress of the Middle Ages. Her writings, now known as Revelations of Divine Love, are the earliest surviving English language works by a woman, although it is possible that some anonymous works may have had female authors. They are also the only surviving English language works by an anchoress.
In Christianity, an anchorite or anchoret is someone who, for religious reasons, withdraws from secular society to be able to lead an intensely prayer-orientated, ascetic, or Eucharist-focused life. Anchorites are frequently considered to be a type of hermit, but unlike hermits, they were required to take a vow of stability of place, opting for permanent enclosure in cells often attached to churches. Also unlike hermits, anchorites were subject to a religious rite of consecration that closely resembled the funeral rite, following which they would be considered dead to the world and a type of living saint. Anchorites had a certain autonomy, as they did not answer to any ecclesiastical authority apart from bishops.
Margery Kempe was an English Christian mystic, known for writing through dictation The Book of Margery Kempe, a work considered by some to be the first autobiography in the English language. Her book chronicles her domestic tribulations, her extensive pilgrimages to holy sites in Europe and the Holy Land, as well as her mystical conversations with God. She is honoured in the Anglican Communion, but has not been canonised as a Catholic saint.
Wycliffe's Bible or Wycliffite Bibles or Wycliffian Bibles (WYC) are names given for a sequence of Middle English Bible translations believed to have been made under the direction or instigation of English theologian John Wycliffe of the University of Oxford. They represent the earliest known literal translations of the entire Bible into English. They appeared over a period from approximately 1382 to 1395.
Richard Rolle was an English hermit, mystic, and religious writer. He is also known as Richard Rolle of Hampole or de Hampole, since at the end of his life he lived near a Cistercian nunnery in Hampole, now in South Yorkshire. In the words of Nicholas Watson, scholarly research has shown that "[d]uring the fifteenth century he was one of the most widely read of English writers, whose works survive in nearly four hundred English ... and at least seventy Continental manuscripts, almost all written between 1390 and 1500." In many ways, he can be considered the first English author, insofar as his vernacular works were widely considered to have considerable religious authority and influence soon after his death, and for centuries afterwards.
De heretico comburendo or the Suppression of Heresy Act 1400 was a law passed by Parliament under King Henry IV of England in 1401 for the suppression of the Lollards. It punished seditious heretics with burning at the stake. This law was one of the strictest religious censorship statutes ever enacted in England, affecting preaching and possession of Lollard literature.
The term Middle English literature refers to the literature written in the form of the English language known as Middle English, from the late 12th century until the 1470s. During this time the Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English, became widespread and the printing press regularized the language. Between the 1470s and the middle of the following century there was a transition to early Modern English. In literary terms, the characteristics of the literary works written did not change radically until the effects of the Renaissance and Reformed Christianity became more apparent in the reign of King Henry VIII. There are three main categories of Middle English literature, religious, courtly love, and Arthurian, though much of Geoffrey Chaucer's work stands outside these. Among the many religious works are those in the Katherine Group and the writings of Julian of Norwich and Richard Rolle.
Martha Reeves is a vowed Anglican solitary, with Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, as bishop-protector. A graduate of the Madeira School, she is also a Stanford-educated professor of theology who has written numerous articles and books under the name "Maggie Ross" as well as translated a number of Carthusian Novice Conferences. Reeves, at one time Desmond Tutu's spiritual director, was Bell Distinguished Professor in Anglican and Ecumenical Studies appointed to the Department of Philosophy and Religion, Kendall College of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tulsa. In 1995, "A Rite for Contemplative Eucharist" emerged while being a theologian-in-residence in an Episcopal church in the Diocese of Southern Ohio. In March 2008, she donated 'silence' to the Museum of Curiosity.. Ross as an interviewee also shared about silence in the 2015 documentary In Pursuit of Silence directed by Patrick Shen. In October 2016, she gave the lecture "Healing Silence' at Durham University for its "Spirituality, Theology, and Health Seminar Series." The Hay Festival has been an event for presenting about the 'work of silence' under the topic title "Maggie Ross Talks to Rachael Kerr". She was an attendee of the 2018 Epiphany Conference on science and religion, a collaborative initiative between the Cambridge Epiphany Philosophers and the Oxford Monastic Institute. The 'work of silence' has touched grounds for many years now through the ravenwilderness blogspot, and an index of posts from 2006 to 2013 can be viewed from here and the entries from 2013 to 2020 here. The British & Irish Association for Practical Theology (BIAPT) had a planned inaugural event for its Spirituality Interest Special Group in 2020, with Ross as keynote speaker but was postponed. The keynote address "Silent Ways of Knowing" had been shared in four parts in Ross's blog. Reeves lives in Oxford, the United Kingdom, where a number of sermons and talks had been shared through the years in churches and academia around the area.
Margaret Kirkby, was an anchorite of Ravensworth in North Yorkshire, England. She was the principal disciple of the hermit Richard Rolle, and the recipient of much of his writings.
Anne Middleton was an American medievalist, and the Florence Green Bixby Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.
Affective piety is most commonly described as a style of highly emotional devotion to the humanity of Jesus, particularly in his infancy and his death, and to the joys and sorrows of the Virgin Mary. It was a major influence on many varieties of devotional literature in late-medieval Europe, both in Latin and in the vernaculars. This practice of prayer, reading, and meditation was often cultivated through visualization and concentration on vivid images of scenes from the Bible, Saints' Lives, Virgin Mary, Christ and religious symbols, feeling from the result. These images could be either conjured up in people's minds when they read or heard poetry and other pieces of religious literature, or they could gaze on manuscript illuminations and other pieces of art as they prayed and meditated on the scenes depicted. In either case, this style of affective meditation asked the "viewer" to engage with the scene as if she or he were physically present and to stir up feelings of love, fear, grief, and/or repentance for sin.
Barbara Jane Newman is an American medievalist, literary critic, religious historian, and author. She is Professor of English and Religion, and John Evans Professor of Latin, at Northwestern University. Newman was elected in 2017 to the American Philosophical Society.
Richard Kieckhefer is an American medievalist, religious historian, scholar of church architecture, and author. He is Professor of History and John Evans Professor of Religious Studies at Northwestern University.
Morton W. Bloomfield was an American Medievalist. He was the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of English at Harvard University. He is best known for his scholarly work, teaching and mentoring on Medieval literature, language, as well as contributions to intellectual history, literary criticism and theory. He also was one of the founders of the first U.S. national center for the humanities, the National Humanities Center.
Fred Colson Robinson was an American historian at Yale University. He was widely considered one of the world's foremost authorities on Old English.
Alastair J. Minnis 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., having been mentored by M.B. Parkes and Beryl Smalley. Following appointments at the Queen's University of Belfast and Bristol University, 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.
Penelope Billings Reed Doob was an American-born Canadian medievalist, dance scholar, and medical researcher. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974 for her research on medieval literature.
Vincent Gillespie, FEA is Emeritus J. R. R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language at the University of Oxford. He was editor of the Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies Series from 2002 until 2023, and was the Honorary Director of the Early English Text Society from 2013 until 2023, having previously served as its Executive Secretary from 2004 until 2013. His major research area is late medieval English literature. He has published over sixty articles and book chapters ranging from medieval book history, through Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, to the medieval mystics such as Richard Rolle and, most recently, Julian of Norwich. He has a special interest in the medieval English Carthusians, and in Syon Abbey, the only English house of the Birgittine order. In 2001, he published Syon Abbey, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues 9, an edition and analysis of the late-medieval library registrum of the Birgittine brethren of Syon Abbey. He is the author of Looking in Holy Books, and the forthcoming A Short History of Medieval English Mysticism. He is the co-editor, with Kantik Ghosh, of After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England, with Susan Powell of A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain, 1476-1558, with Samuel Fanous of The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Mysticism, and with Anne Hudson of Probable Truth: Editing Medieval Texts from Britain in the Twenty-First Century.
Nigel Smith is a literature professor and scholar of the early modern world. He is William and Annie S. Paton Foundation Professor of Ancient and Modern Literature and Professor of English at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1999. He is best known for his interdisciplinary work, bridging literature and history, on 17th-century political and religious radicalism and the literature of the English Revolution, including the poetry and prose of John Milton and Andrew Marvell.
Theodore Silverstein was a British-born American scholar of medieval literature. His focuses for research included Middle English poetry and medieval poetry in general; Dante's The Divine Comedy; the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and the 4th-century Apocalypse of Paul, a popular and influential work in the Middle Ages. Silverstein initially taught at the University of Kansas City. He then served in the United States Army Air Forces as an intelligence officer from 1942 to 1945 during World War II, specializing in interrogating captured German and Italian pilots and analyzing intercepted Luftwaffe communications. He was a Professor of English at the University of Chicago from 1947 to 1973, after which he took emeritus status.