Philip Knox

My research looks at later medieval English and mainland European literature. A key interest is the thirteenth-century French poem The Romance of the Rose, and how it was read in medieval England. I've written a book about this, called The 'Romance of the Rose' and the Making of Fourteenth-Century English Literature, and I'm currently thinking through different ways of approaching related questions of literary reception and the history of reading. I’m also interested in how medieval literature interacts with intellectual culture in all its forms, and have edited a book (with Jonathan Morton and Daniel Reeve) that looks at these issues: Medieval Thought Experiments: Poetry, Hypothesis and Experience in the European Middle Ages. Some of this work has looked especially at medieval political philosophy, and how it might relate to histories of gender and sexuality. Finally, I’m interested in medieval lyric, and especially in the interaction between lyric and narrative in the Middle Ages. I work a lot with manuscript materials, and I like to use Cambridge’s rich collections of medieval books in my teaching.

- '“Thomas Skreveyn”: Some Autograph Documents by Thomas Usk', Medium Aevum 94 (2025), 111–32. - 'Reading a Philosophical Florilegium in London in the 1380s: Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love and the Parvi flores (Auctoritates Aristotelis)', Studies in the Age of Chaucer 47 (2025), 167–206.