Dr. Joseph Grossi
Position
Contact
Credentials
BA (Providence College), MA and PhD (Ohio State)
Area of expertise
Old and Middle English literature
My primary home at UVic is the English Department, where I contribute both to the Medieval Studies research cluster and to the MEMS concentration. I also teach in the Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies and the Medieval Studies Program. My doctoral dissertation explored the demonization of Rome and Italy in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English writing, and for the most part my subsequent publications have concerned authors and topics in Middle English literature. Having recently branched out into Anglo-Saxon studies and, on occasion, the Italian Trecento, I’m happy to supervise undergraduate and graduate students in any of the areas in which I work.
Recent courses/modules include ENGL 340 (Intro. to Old English), ENGL 341 (Old English Literature), ENGL 344A (Chaucer: Canterbury Tales), ENGL 344B (Chaucer’s Troilus and Minor Works), ENGL 410 (Backgrounds to English Literary Traditions), ENGL 516 (Special Topics: Studies in Middle English Literature), ITAL 273 (Italian Renaissance), ITAL 472A (Boccaccio’s Decameron), ITAL 472B (Petrarch: His Life as Literature), MEDI 303 (Intro. to the Medieval World), and MEDI 304 (twice: Italian Medieval Travel Narratives; Sea, Swamps, and Saints in Medieval East Anglia). Upcoming courses include ENGL 515 (Studies in Middle English Literature: Chaucer and Italian Literature, summer 2019) and MEDI 401 (The World of Dante’s Divine Comedy, spring 2020).
Selected publications
Angles on a Kingdom: East Anglian Identities from Bede to Ælfric. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. Monograph.
“Dante, Peacemaker of the Lunigiana.” Dante Studies 139 (2021): 58-93"
“Jacobus de Voragine.” Invited entry in The Chaucer Encyclopedia. Ed. Richard Newhauser, Vincent Gillespie, Jessica Rosenfeld, and Katie Walter. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Forthcoming.
“Felix and His Kings.” Guthlac: Crowland’s Saint. Ed. Jane Roberts and Alan Thacker. Donington, Lincolnshire (UK): Paul Watkins, 2020. 157-79.
“Fiction from Putrefaction: Hereward in the Wake of Old English.” Early Middle English 1.1 (2019): 91-99.
“Durham.” In The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain. Gen. eds. Siân Echard and Robert Rouse. Volume 2. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 2017. 713-15.
“The Durham Proverbs.” Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain. Volume 2. 716-18.
“A Place of ‘Long-Lasting Evil and Unhappiness’: Rædwald’s East Anglia in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History’. New Medieval Literatures 15 (2015 for 2013): 95-118.
“Barrow Exegesis: Quotation, Chorography and Felix's Life of St. Guthlac.” Florilegium 30 (2015 for 2013): 143-65. Invited contribution to the special issue “Interpretive Conflations: Exegesis and the Arts in the Middle Ages,” guest-edited by Gernot Wieland.
“Anti-Petrarchism in the Decameron’s Proem and Introduction?” Quaderni d’italianistica 33.2 (2012): 5-26.
“Preserving the Future in the Old English Durham.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 111.1 (2012): 42-73.
“Cloistered Lydgate, Commercial Scribe: British Library MS Harley 2255 Revisited.” Mediaeval Studies 72 (2010): 313-61.
“Geoffrey Chaucer,” “Dante Alighieri,” and “John Lydgate.” In An Encyclopedia of Time. Ed. H. James Birx. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2009.
“Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Tale.” In The Literary Encyclopaedia (online), ed. Robert Clark (Univ. of East Anglia), 2007.
“‘Wher ioye is ay lastyng’: John Lydgate’s Contemptus Mundi in British Library MS Harley 2255.” Leeds Studies in English, new series, 36 (2005): 303-34.
“Imagining Genoa in Late Medieval England.” Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 35 (2004): 387-434.
“John Capgrave’s ‘Smal Pypying’: Marvelling at Rome in Ye Solace of Pilgrimes.” Medievalia et Humanistica, new series, 30 (2004): 55-83.
“The Unhidden Piety of Chaucer’s ‘Seint Cecilie.’” The Chaucer Review 36.3 (2002): 298-309.
“The Question of the King’s Grace in the Alliterative Morte Arthure, 2320.” Notes & Queries 245 (2000): 293-5. Postscript/corrigenda in Notes & Queries, 246 (2001), 40-41.
“The Clerk vs the Wife of Bath: Nominalism, Carnival and Chaucer’s Last Laugh.” Literary Nominalism and the Theory of Rereading Late Medieval Texts: A New Research Paradigm. Ed. Richard J. Utz. Mediaeval Studies series, 5 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1995), pp. 147-78.
Work in progress
“Fens and Foes: Hereward ‘the Wake’ and the Abbeys of Ely and Peterborough.” Projected monograph.