Dr. Philip Knox
Biography
I am an Associate Professor 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 looks at later medieval English and mainland European literature. A key interest is the thirteenth-century French poem The Romance of the Rose, and how it was read in medieval England. I've written a book about this, called The 'Romance of the Rose' and the Making of Fourteenth-Century English Literature, and I'm currently thinking through different ways of approaching related questions of literary reception and the history of reading. 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. Some of this work has looked especially at medieval political philosophy, and how it might relate to histories of gender and sexuality. 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.
Areas of Graduate Supervision
For the MPhil in English Studies, I regularly co-teach the Poetry and Poetics Research Frameworks Seminar, which ranges across materials from different historical periods. I also supervise MPhil dissertations on a range of medieval topics. If you are interested in concentrating on medieval studies for the MPhil, please see our page here: https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/research/medieval/mphil/
Current and past PhD students have purused research that explores a range of English, Latin and French texts, and addressing topics including animal studies, law and literature, queer and transgender theory. Get in touch if you want to talk about working together on a PhD project.
Connect with Philip
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
- '"Thomas Skreveyn": Some Autograph Documents by Thomas Usk', Medium Aevum 94 (2025), 111–32.
- 'Reading a Philosophical Florilegium in London in the 1380s: Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love and the Parvi flores (Auctoritates Aristotelis)', Studies in the Age of Chaucer 47 (2025), 167–206.
- '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)