Dr Philip Knox, Faculty of English
pk453@cam.ac.uk
Biographical Information
pk453 [at] cam.ac.uk
I am a University Lecturer in Medieval English Literature and a fellow of King's College.
I am one of the editors of New Medieval Literatures, an annual of work on medieval textual cultures.
Research Interests
My research focuses on how the literature of fourteenth-century England interacts with literature from mainland Europe. My primary interest is in how English writers like Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, William Langland, and the Gawain-poet respond to a hugely influential French poem called the Romance of the Rose. I've written a book about this, called The 'Romance of the Rose' and the Making of Fourteenth-Century English Literature. I’m also interested in how medieval literature interacts with intellectual culture in all its forms, and have edited a book (with Jonathan Morton and Daniel Reeve) that looks at these issues: Medieval Thought Experiments: Poetry, Hypothesis and Experience in the European Middle Ages. Finally, I’m interested in medieval lyric, and especially in the interaction between lyric and narrative in the Middle Ages. I work a lot with manuscript materials, and I like to use Cambridge’s rich collections of medieval books in my teaching.
Selected Publications
Books
- The 'Romance of the Rose' and the Making of Fourteenth-Century English Literature, Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture (Oxford: OUP, 2022)
- [ed., with Jonathan Morton and Daniel Reeve], Medieval Thought Experiments: Poetry, Hypothesis, and Experience in the European Middle Ages, Disputatio 31 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018)
Essays and articles
- 'Thinking Inside and Outside the University', in John Marenbon (ed.), King’s Hall, Cambridge, and the Fourteenth-Century Universities: New Perspectives (Leiden: Brill, 2020), pp. 187–217.
- ‘The Form of the Whole’, in Ryan Perry and Mary-Jo Arn (eds), Charles d’Orléans' English Aesthetic (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2020), pp. 253–74.
- 'Human Nature and Natural Law in Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose', in Jonathan Morton and Marco Nievergelt, with John Marenbon, eds, The 'Roman de la Rose' and Thirteenth-Century Thought, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 111 (Cambridge: CUP, 2020), pp. 131–48.
- ‘Desire for the Good: Jean de Meun, Boethius, and the “homme devisé en deuz”’, in Knox, Morton and Reeve, eds, Medieval Thought Experiments: Poetry, Hypothesis, and Experience in the European Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), pp. 223-45.
- ‘“Hyt am y”: Voicing Selves in the Book of the Duchess, the Roman de la rose, and the Fonteinne Amoureuse’, in Jamie Fumo, ed., Chaucer’s ‘Book of the Duchess’: Contexts and Interpretations, Chaucer Studies 45 (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2018), pp. 135–56.
- ‘Circularity and Linearity: The Idea of the Lyric and the Idea of the Book in the Cent Ballades of Jean le Seneschal’, New Medieval Literatures 16 (2016), 213–49.
- [with William Poole and Mark Griffith], ‘Reading Chaucer in New College, Oxford, in the 1630s: The Commendatory Verses to Francis Kynaston’s Amorum Troili et Creseidae’, Medium Aevum 85 (2016), 33–58.
- ‘The “Dialect” of Chaucer’s Reeve’, The Chaucer Review 49 (2014), 102–24.
- ‘The English Glosses in Walter of Bibbesworth’s Tretiz’, Notes and Queries 60 (2013), 349–59.
Translations:
- ‘The Perfect Knight’ [an extract from Gui de Warewic, translated from the Anglo-Norman], in Laura Ashe (ed.), Early Fiction in England, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin, 2015)
