Anthony Bale
Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature, University of Cambridge
I am Professor of Medieval & Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. I research later medieval English literature and culture. Throughout my work I've been concerned with the relationship between margins and peripheries in medieval culture, and with recovering neglected sources and voices from the medieval past. I am a 2011 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. 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 led 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). In 2023 I published A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: the World through Medieval Eyes (Penguin, 2023; Norton 2024). 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.
EXPs by Anthony Bale
With the 1480 Siege of Rhodes, we start to see the first use of the word ‘news’ in English to mean reports of recent events. You can reconstruct in quite a lot of detail who has the interest in the news, who has the means to produce the news, and you can locate that in particular moments in time, in cities, in political contexts.
The story of a 15th century bourgeois woman opens an absolutely unique window onto the medieval past, onto details of everyday life – domesticity, embarrassment, caring for one's husband, food – these really important parts of being alive.
The witch comes out of a deeply misogynistic, deeply anti-feminist ideology of the Middle Ages and is very much connected to violence against women and the erasure of women.