Professor Anthony Bale

Anthony Bale’s research interests are in late medieval English literature, culture, and popular religion. In particular, his research has explored Christian ideas about Jews and Judaism, the poetry of John Lydgate, the cult of St Edmund, Sir John Mandeville and his Book, pain and affect in medieval religion, the representation of Jerusalem, the history of imprisonment, travel and The Book of Margery Kempe. More recently, his research has focused on pilgrimage and travel, and the eastern Mediterranean in the later fifteenth century.

His research has been enriched by a number of creative projects. These include working with an animator on medieval manuscripts, and as an academic advisor for two exhibitions, Blood: Uniting & Dividing and Jews, Money, Myth, developed jointly by the Pears Institute and the Jewish Museum London.

Books

• Margery Kempe, Reaktion, 2021.
• Medieval English Travel, eds., Oxford University Press, 2019 (with Sebastian Sobecki).
• The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the Crusades, ed., Cambridge University Press, 2018.
• Blood: Reflections on What Unites and Divides Us, eds., Bloomsbury, 2015 (with David Feldman).
• The Book of Margery Kempe, translated by Anthony Bale, Oxford University Press, 2015.
• The Book of Marvels and Travels, John Mandeville, translated by Anthony Bale, Oxford University Press, 2012.
• Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages, Reaktion, 2010.
• John Lydgate, The Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund and the Extra Miracles of St Edmund, Edited from British Library MS Harley 2278 and Bodleian MS Ashmole 46, ed., Middle English Texts series, Heidelberg: Universitaetsverlag Winter, 2009 (co-edited with A. S. G. Edwards).
• St Edmund King and Martyr: Changing Images of a Medieval Saint, editor of a collection of essays about the medieval cult of St Edmund, Medieval Press, 2009.
• The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms 1350-1500, Cambridge University Press, 2006, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature #60.

Book Chapters

• ‘From Nidaros to Jerusalem; from Feginsbrekka to Mount Joy’, in eds. Kristin Aavitsland and Line Bonde, Tracing the Jerusalem Code I (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2020), 187-93.
• ‘Pilgrims’ texts’, in ed. Alexandra Gillespie and Deidre Lynch, The Unfinished Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
• ‘Where did Margery Kempe cry?’, in Fluid Bodies and Bodily Fluids: Bodies, Blood, and Tears in Literature, Theology, and Art, ed. Anne Scott and Michael Barbezat (ARC, 2019), pp. 15-30.
• ‘Chaucer’s Sense of an Ending’, with Patricia Ingham, Cambridge Companion to the Canterbury Tales, ed. Frank Grady, Cambridge University Press, 2020.
• ‘Chaucer’s Borders’, for ed. Ian Johnson, Geoffrey Chaucer in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
• ‘The Virgin of Bethlehem, Gender, and Space’, in Gender in Medieval Spaces, Places, and Thresholds, ed. Victoria Blud, Diane Heath, Einat Klafter (London: IHR, 2018), xv-xviii
• ‘Dracula’s Blood’, in The Cambridge Companion to Dracula, ed. Roger Luckhurst, Cambridge University Press, 2017.
• ‘Belligerent Literacy, Bookplates, and Graffiti: Dorothy Helbarton’s Book’, in ed. Adam Smyth and Gill Partington, Book Destruction, Palgrave, 2014, pp. 131-60.
• ‘Christians and Jews, Love and Hate’, in ed. Holly Crocker and Vance Smith, Middle English Literature: Criticism and Debate, Routledge, 2013, pp. 73-81.
• ‘Afterword: the memory of atrocity’, in ed. Sethina Watson and Sarah Rees-Jones, The York Massacre of 1190 in Context, Boydell and Brewer, 2012, pp. 294-304.
• ‘Lydgate’s Chaucer’, in ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and James Simpson, The Oxford Handbook to Chaucer, Oxford University Press, 2019.
• ‘”A maner Latyn corrupt”: Chaucer and the Absent Religions’, for ed. Helen Phillips, Chaucer and Religion, D. S. Brewer, 2010, pp. 52-65.
• ‘St Edmund in Fifteenth-Century London: The Lydgatian Miracles of St Edmund‘, in ed. Anthony Bale, St Edmund King and Martyr, York Medieval Press, 2009.
• ‘Christian Antisemitism and Intermedial Experience in Late Medieval England’ for eds. Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield, Religions of the Book: Co-existence and Conflict 1400-1600, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
• ‘Boys, Lady Sibylle, c. 1370- c. 1456, literary patron’, for The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2008.
• ‘The female “Jewish” libido in medieval culture’, in eds. Amanda Hopkins and Cory Rushton, The Erotic in the Literature of Medieval Britain, D. S. Brewer, 2007, pp. 94-104.
• ‘Stow’s Medievalism and antique Judaism in early modern London’, in eds. Ian A. Gadd and Alexandra Gillespie, John Stow (1525-1605) and the Making of the English Past, British Library, 2004, pp. 69-80.
• ‘Fictions of Judaism in England before 1290’, in ed. Patricia Skinner, The Jews in Medieval Britain, Boydell & Brewer, 2003, pp.129-144.

Journal Articles

• ‘News from the East’, Studies In The Age of Chaucer 45, 2023.
• ‘Curating the past: blood and money in London’, Jewish Culture and History 23 (1), 2022, pp. 3-20. ISSN 1462-169X (with J. Rosenthal)
• ‘Pilgrimage and textual culture’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 51 (1), 2021, pp. 1-8 (with K. Beebe)
• ‘Reflections on Chaucer, Pedagogy, and the Profession of Medieval Studies’, New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession 1 (1), 2020, pp. 5-17.
• ‘Is Brexit a ‘crusade’?‘, FifteenthEightyFour, 2019.
• ‘Richard Salthouse of Norwich and the scribe of The Book of Margery Kempe’, Chaucer Review 52, 2017, pp. 173-87.
• “ut legi”: Sir John Mandeville’s Audience and Three Late Medieval English Travelers to Italy and Jerusalem“, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 38, 2016, pp. 201-237.
• ‘God’s Cell: Christ as Prisoner and Pilgrimage to the Prison of Christ’, Speculum, 91.1, 2016, pp. 1-35.
• ‘The woman in white: why Margery Kempe divides modern readers as much as she did her medieval audience’, The Times Literary Supplement, December 19 and 26 2014, pp. 16-17.
• ‘Late medieval book-owners named John Leche’, Bodleian Library Record, 25.1, 2012, pp. 1-19.
• ‘A Norfolk Gentlewoman and Lydgatian Patronage: Lady Sibylle Boys and her Cultural Environment’, in Medium Aevum, 78.2, 2009, pp. 394-413.
• ‘Twenty-first-century Lydgate’, Modern Philology, review article, May 2008.
• ‘From translator to laureate: imagining the medieval author‘, Literature Compass, 2008.
• ‘The Jew in profile’, New Medieval Literatures, 8, Brepols, 2006, pp.125-150.
• ‘Richard of Devizes and fictions of Judaism’, Jewish Culture and History, 3:2, 2001, pp. 46-65.

Anthony Bale is currently supervising or co-supervising several doctoral projects, including two AHRC-funded students. He is happy to consider enquiries from potential doctoral students on topics relating to:

• Aspects of medieval English literature and culture 1200-1550
• Chaucer, Mandeville, Lydgate
• Pilgrimage, the medieval Holy Land, Jerusalem
• Editing and translating medieval texts, book history, marginalia
• Medieval Anglo-Jewish history, the history of antisemitism
• Medieval hagiography