Jonathan Morton specializes in medieval literature with a particular interest in the interrelation between philosophy and art (broadly understood) and in literature’s mediation between knowledge, experience, and desire.  After working as a school teacher in London, he completed a doctoral thesis at Oxford, which was the foundation for his recently published monograph The "Roman de la rose" in its Philosophical Context: Art, Nature, and Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2018). He comes to the MPIWG from King’s College London, where he was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the French Department. Before that he was a Junior Research Fellow at New College, Oxford. He has published articles on the Romance of the Rose, on medieval bestiaries, and on allegory more generally, and co-edited a collection entitled Medieval Thought Experiments: Poetry, Hypothesis, and Experience in the European Middle Ages (Brepols, 2018) and another on the Romance of the Rose and medieval philosophy (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

Publications include:

  • The "Roman de la rose" in its Philosophical Context: Art, Nature, and Ethics (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018).
  • Medieval Thought Experiments: Poetry, Hypothesis, and Experience in the European Middle Ages, ed. Philip Knox, Jonathan Morton, and Daniel Reeve (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018).
  • "The Book of the World at an Anglo-Norman Court: The Bestiaire de Philippe de Thaon as a Theological Performance," New Medieval Literatures Vol. 16 Boydell & Brewer, 2016. p. 1–38.
  • The "Romance of the Rose" and Thirteenth-Century Thought, ed. Jonathan Morton and Marco Nievergelt with John Marenbon (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, forthcoming).
  • "Engin: Creativity, Invention, and Knowledge in the Medieval Romance Tradition of Alexander the Great," Romanic Review, forthcoming.

Projects

No current projects were found for this scholar.

Medieval Ingenium: Knowledge, Experience, and Technology

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Selected Publications

Morton, Jonathan (2022). “Making Sense of ‘ingenium’: Translating Thought in Twelfth-Century Latin Texts on Cognition.” In Premodern Experience of the Natural World in Translation, ed. K. Krause, M. Auxent, and D. Weil, 90–110. New York, NY:…

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Morton, Jonathan (2021). “Automates, robots et orients utopiques dans les romans du XIIe siècle.” In Les utopies scientifiques au Moyen Âge et à la Renaissance, ed. R. Poma and N. Weill-Parot, 25–43. Florence: SISMEL-Galluzzo.

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Morton, Jonathan (2020). “Allegory.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory, ed. J. Frow. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1047.

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Morton, Jonathan and Marco Nievergelt (2020). “Introduction.” In The ‘Roman de la Rose’ and Thirteenth-Century Thought, ed. J. Morton, M. Nievergelt, and J. Marenbon, 1–23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108348799…

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Past Events

News & Press

Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow Jonathan Morton Receives Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Scholarship

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