At Birkbeck I teach on the BA English, MA Medieval Cultures and supervise doctoral students working on medieval topics. My research interests are in histories and theories of 'antisemitism', late medieval English literature, culture and popular religion, the poetry of John Lydgate, visual and intermedial artefacts, the history of the pre-expulsion medieval English Jewish community, late medieval travel literature, and histories of blood libel and ritual murder.
My monogragh study of late medieval English writing about Jews called The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms 1350-1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) was awarded a Koret Foundation Jewish Studies Publications Program award and the 2006/7 Ronald Tress Prize. This was followed by an AHRC-funded study of audience and prestige in fifteenth-century English writing, in particular concering the poetry of John Lydgate; this resulted in several articles, a co-edition of Lydgate's Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund (with A. S. G. Edwards; published by Winter Verlag, Heidelberg, 2009) and a collection of edited essays on the cult of St Edmund. In 2007 I organised an international conference at Birkbeck on the theme Antisemitism and English Culture. I have recently completed a new monograph, funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, into affective violence and imaginative persecution in late medieval European images of Judaism. Much of the research into this project was understaken as a Frankel Fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, 2008/9.
From September 2009 I am Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English & Humanities and Assistant Dean in the Faculty of Arts.
During the coming academic year I will be lecturing at or contributing to the following conferences and workshops:
Youth, Violence and Cult: The Case of William of Norwich, c. 1144, AHRC workshops at Norwich and London, September 2009; Oxford University Faculty of English Medieval Graduate Seminar, October 2009; 'Approaches to the Medieval City' conference, Columbia University Medieval Guild, New York, USA, October 2009; 'Jerusalem' colloquium, London Medieval Society, November 2009; The Betley Local History Society, November 2009; Medieval Academy congress, Yale University, New Haven, USA, March 2010; 'The York Massacre of 1190 in Context' conference, York, March 2010; 'Jews/Color/Race' conference, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Be'er Sheva, Israel, June 2010; The New Chaucer Society congress, Siena, Italy, July 2010; 'Representing the 'Other': the Jews in Medieval Christendom' National Endowment for the Humanities summer school, Oxford, August 2010.
Some recent publications:
- '"A maner Latyn corrupt": Chaucer and the Absent Religions', for ed. Helen Phillips, Chaucer and Fourteenth-Century Religion (forthcoming, 2008/9)
- 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. Anthony Bale and A. S. G. Edwards (Middle English Texts, Universitaetsverlag Winter - Heidelberg, 2009)
- St Edmund King and Martyr: Changing Images of a Medieval Saint, editor of a collection of essays about the medieval cult of St Edmund (York Medieval Press, 2009)
- '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)
- 'A Norfolk Gentlewoman and Lydgatian Patronage: Lady Sibylle Boys and her Cultural Environment', forthcoming in Medium Aevum 78.2 (2009), 394-413.
- 'Twenty-first-century Lydgate', Modern Philology (review article, May 2008)
- 'From translator to laureate: imagining the medieval author', for Literature Compass (2008)
- '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 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)
- 'Boys, Lady Sibylle, c. 1370- c. 1456, literary patron', for The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (summer 2008 update)
- 'The female "Jewish" libido in medieval culture', in eds. Amanda Hopkins and Cory Rushton, The Erotic in the Literature of Medieval Britain (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007), pp. 94-104
- The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms 1350-1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature #60
- 'The Jew in profile', New Medieval Literatures 8 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), pp. 125-150
- '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 (London: British Library, 2004), pp. 69-80
- 'Fictions of Judaism in England before 1290', in ed. Patricia Skinner, The Jews in Medieval Britain (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2003), pp. 129-144
- 'Richard of Devizes and fictions of Judaism', Jewish Culture and History 3:2 (2001):46-65
-
Some useful links:
Printed from: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/eh/staff/BaleAnthony/index_html