The Medieval Colloquium: Alastair Minnis, “Pleasurable reading and the imagination of paradise: From ‘Les Peines de Purgatorie’ to ‘The Prick of Conscience’ ”

Alastair Minnis is the Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of English at Yale University, President of the New Chaucer Society (2012-14), and a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. Previously he taught at the universities of Belfast, Bristol and York in the UK, and at the Ohio State University in the US. His research methodology brings together reading strategies from literary criticism and the history of ideas, and an interest in medieval philosophy and theology has informed much of his work. His latest books are The Cambridge Introduction to Chaucer (2014) and From Eden to Eternity: Creations of Paradise in the Later Middle Ages (2016).

Supported by The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund at Yale University