Professor Anthony Bale

Degrees, Awards and Prizes

BA (Oxford), MA (University of York), PhD (Oxford), Philip Leverhulme Prize (2011), English Association Beatrice White Prize (2012)

Research Themes

I research later medieval English literature and culture. My early work focussed on Christian-Jewish relations, popular religion, and the history of antisemitism, followed by studies of the poetry of John Lydgate, the cult of St Edmund of East Anglia, and medieval histories of emotion. This then took me into pilgrimage studies, the history of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and editing and translating The Book of Marvels and Travels (Oxford UP, 2012) by John Mandeville and The Book of Margery Kempe (Oxford UP, 2016). 

My research has been supported by grants from the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, among others. I have spent several periods as a visiting scholar at the Huntington Library in California and have been awarded visiting fellowships at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (Frankel Fellowship), the University of Melbourne (Distinguished International Fellowship in the History of Emotions), Harvard University (Bloomfield Fellowship), the University of Wisconsin at Madison (Brittingham Fellowship), and the National Humanities Center, North Carolina. 

I have been involved in several projects curating exhibitions, as academic advisor for the Jewish Museum London’s Blood: Uniting and Dividing (2015-16) and Jews, Money, Myth (2019), which won the Museums Association Museums Change Lives award (2019). I also curated Capsule: Inside the Medieval Book with Leverhulme Artist-in-Residence collaborator, artist Shay Hamias. 

From 2020-2022 I was President of the New Chaucer Society, the leading scholarly society for the study of the literature and culture of the age of Chaucer. 

In 2023 I published A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: the World through Medieval Eyes (Penguin, 2023; Norton 2024), which has since been translated into German, Dutch, Chinese, Bulgarian, Portuguese, and Italian, with further translations to follow. The Times (London) called it ‘a stunning book . . . weird and wonderful and quietly hilarious, but the enormous fun of this book would not be possible without solid graft — Bale’s dogged research and his diligent crafting of perfect prose.’ From 2023-26 I hold a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to support my research on the Ottoman Siege of Rhodes (1480) and the development of late medieval news media.

Responsibilities

My teaching interests cover all aspects of medieval English language and literature, as well as translation and adaptation, creative non-fiction, and manuscript studies. I supervise doctoral students working in these areas too.

Other

I grew up in a small village on the Cheshire/Staffordshire border and was educated at Madeley High School, a state comprehensive school, and City of Stoke-on-Trent Sixth Form College.

Roles within the University

• Professor of Medieval & Renaissance English (1954)

Extra Links

• Instagram and Threads: @RealMandeville