Alastair Minnis

Alastair Minnis's picture
Douglas Tracy Smith Professor Emeritus of English

Professor Emeritus of Medieval Studies and English, University of York
Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America
Fellow of the English Association (UK)
Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy
Doctor of the University, University of York, 2018
M.A., Yale University, 2007
Ph.D., Queen’s University of Belfast, 1976
B.A., Queen’s University of Belfast, 1970

Characteristically, my 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 my work. My latest monograph is Hellish Imaginations from Augustine to Dante: An Essay in Metaphor and Materiality, Medium Ævum Monographs, n.s.37 (Oxford: Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 2020). I also recently published Phantom Pains and Prosthetic Narratives: From George Dedlow to Dante, Elements in Histories of Emotions and the Senses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Selected Publications

From Eden to Eternity: Creations of Paradise in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)

The Cambridge Introduction to Chaucer (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

- Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature: Valuing the Vernacular (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

- Fallible Authors: Chaucer’s Pardoner and Wife of Bath (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

- (ed., with Jane Roberts), Text, Image, Interpretation: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature and its Insular Context in Honour of Éamonn Ó Carragáin (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007).

- Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London: Scolar Press, 1984). Second, revised edition published by Gower Books, Aldershot, and University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988, in hardback and paperback forms. In 2009 the University of Pennsylvania Press re-issued the second edition, with a new introductory essay.

- (with A.B. Scott, ed.), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c.1100-c.1375: The Commentary Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Revised, paperback edition published 1991, rpt. 2001.

- Chaucer’s Shorter Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995; rpt. 2000).

- Magister Amoris: The ‘Roman de la Rose’ and Vernacular Hermeneutics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

- (ed., with Ian Johnson) The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2: The Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Paperback version published in 2009.

(co-authored with Tim William Machan), ‘The Occasion of Chaucer’s Boece’, New Medieval Literatures, 23 (2023), 130-78.

‘Demonic prosthesis and the walking dead: The materiality of Chaucer’s Green Yeoman’, New Medieval Literatures, 22 (2022), 114-61.

‘Bending Augustine’s Nose, Or How to Authorize Sexual Pleasure’, The Medieval Journal, 8.2 (2018), 1-20.

- Aggressive Chaucer: Of dolls, drink and Dante’, The Medieval Translator, 16 (2016), 357-76. Edited by Pieter de Leemans and Michele Goyens. 

-Acculturizing Aristotle: Matthew of Linköping’s translation of Poetic Representation’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, 124 (2005), 238-59.