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.
Projekte
Medieval Ingenium: Knowledge, Experience, and Technology
Selected Publications
Morton, Jonathan (2024). “Philosophies: Cosmos and Politics, Harmony and Disharmony.” In A Cultural History of Western Music. Vol. 2: A Cultural History of Western Music in the Middle Ages, ed. H. Deeming and E. E. Leach, 55–79. London: Bloomsbury…
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Morton, Jonathan (2023). “Out of Time: Ekphrasis, Narration, and Temporal Experience in Twelfth-Century Romances of Antiquity.” Interfaces 10: 116–150. https://doi.org/10.54103/interfaces-10-07.
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Morton, Jonathan (2023). “Humans, Animals, and Nature in the ‘Rose.’” In Approaches to Teaching the Romance of the Rose, ed. D. Delogu and A.-H. Miller, 113–125. New York, NY: Modern Language Association of America.
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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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Past Events
Seminar
Knowledge and the Sciences of Improving the Mind
MORESummer Colloquium
Why Did People in Medieval Europe Think that Virgil Made Robots? Science Fiction, Astral Magic, and Literary Theory
MOREResearch Colloquium
Engines of Invention: Thinking Technology in the High Middle Ages
MORESeminar Series "The Uses of Imagination: Between Science and Art"
The Science of Character: Realism and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle England
MORESeminar Series "The Uses of Imagination: Between Science and Art"
Performing Knowledge: Experiments between Arts, Science, and Politics
MORESeminar Series "The Uses of Imagination: Between Science and Art"
Around the Pluriverse in 9 Objects: Cosmological Compositions for Critical Zones
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