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 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.