James Simpson
James Simpson is Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard University. Until December 2004 he was Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. He was born and educated in Melbourne, Australia (University of Melbourne 1972-76), before doing his graduate work at Oxford (1978-81). He began his career in the University of London (1981-1989). Simpson was trained to be a specialist in the literatures of later medieval Western Europe (twelfth to fifteenth centuries). His first two books focused on the great late fourteenth-century religious poem, Piers Plowman, and on traditions of later medieval humanism respectively. More recently, he has begun to look across the periodic fence as it were, to the Early modern period. The sixteenth century is routinely hailed as a decisive moment for the shaping of modern Europe, a moment in which powerful movements (humanism and Protestantism) broke away from the oppressive constraints of the ‘medieval’ in all its forms. Seen from the perspective of a medievalist, however, the Early Modern period looks very different: so far from being a period of liberation, its cultural forms look, instead, highly authoritarian and centralised. Simpson’s first salvo as a medievalist challenging Early modernist triumphalism was a literary and cultural history of England 1350-1547, Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2002). He now intends to concentrate his work on the Early Modern period itself, and especially on the Biblical reading practices that shaped the identities of Protestant Europe and America.
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