Vita

Daniel Reeve received his DPhil in medieval English literature from the University of Oxford (awarded 2015), where he also held a number of teaching positions. In 2013, he was an AHRC International Placement Scheme fellow at the Huntington Library, California. His research interests span a wide range of medieval textual cultures, with particular foci including verse romance, vernacular religious writing, heresy, music, insular French literature, and medieval and modern literary theory.

He is currently revising his doctoral thesis for publication as a monograph, provisionally entitled Believing in Romance: English Narrative in the Long Thirteenth Century. He is also editing (with Philip Knox and Jonathan Morton) and contributing to a collection of essays on the intersection of literature and philosophy in the Middle Ages, entitled Medieval Thought Experiments: Poetry and Hypothesis in Europe, 1100–1500.

The Poetics of Circularity in
Medieval Europe

ICI Project 2016-18

The figurative language of circular motion offers an important perspective on medieval culture. Medieval texts use circles as symbols of divine perfection and simplicity, but they are also frequently used to indicate sin and futility. This project will study the interactions between these two kinds of circularity in various kinds of medieval writing, attending particularly to texts in which transcendent and futile circularity are not always easily distinguishable.

This area of investigation offers important insights into the rich complexities of a range of medieval temporalities: historical, narrative, musical, liturgical, and meditative. These insights will lead in turn to new readings of literary and musical texts whose form is self-referentially circular.