Jonathan Morton

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: Oxford UP, 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 allegory more generally, and co-edited a collection entitled Medieval Thought Experiments: Poetry, Hypothesis, and Experience in the European Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018) and another on the Romance of the Rose and medieval philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, forthcoming). He is currently interested especially twelfth- and thirteenth-century Western European thought and literature and, in particular, in machines as models for thought and in the relationship between poetry and engineering in medieval science and science fiction. He comes to the MPIWG to work with Katja Krause’s research group on experience in pre-modern science.