Henry Ravenhall

I am currently Assistant Professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley. I am a scholar of medieval French literature and culture, and my research focuses on the role of manuscript materiality in shaping the way readers engaged with stories and ideas. I am interested in bringing modern theoretical concepts into dialogue with medieval texts and books, which I firmly believe share more than we might first expect with contemporary culture and media. For an outline of my interests, you can read recent interviews with me here and here.

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My first monograph, Anachrony and Assemblage: Reading Manuscript Culture in Medieval Soissons, tells the story of a fascinating French book written and illustrated in northern France around 1300. This artifact transmits a medieval bestseller, the Histoire ancienne jusqu'à César (“Ancient History up to Caesar”), the very first universal history in French. This richly complex manuscript, I argue, is paradigmatic of a set of issues intrinsic to reading in a culture where texts were copied by hand, within specific environments, and to local ideological ends. My broader theoretical intervention is to put pressure on one of the most fundamental heuristics in medieval literary studies: the separation of text (as authorial creation) from manuscript (as material form). When we approach manuscripts as material objects in their own right, and not as testimony to lost originals, we see how they cannot be said to belong to one specific time; they are, in other words, anachronic. How we recognize and deal with this anachrony is my book's core project.

 

My second monograph, still in progress, considers the importance of touch in the manuscript reading experience. With the provisional title Touch and the Experiences of Medieval French Manuscripts, this book documents the development of haptic reading practices over the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, arguing that handling the manuscript and defacing its images were not secondary to the meaning-making process, but instead a central component. After an opening discussion of the state of the art on book-touching, the chapters examine traces of tactile interaction to address, respectively: contingency and exemplarity in history books; multi-sensory experience in devotional poetry; the mediation of desire in romance; the virtuality of allegory in the Roman de la Rose; and constructions of race and otherness through what I term a “disavowing” touch. This monograph thus sheds new light on the sensoriality and sociality of reading in the Middle Ages, a history that, once we recover it from medieval artifacts, might challenge or complexify how we understand reading today across different media forms. Ultimately, I argue, medieval manuscript culture prompts us to generatively rethink—through the figure of touch—the ethics and politics of the interface. 

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​I am one of the editors of The Values of the Vernacular: Essays in Medieval Romance Languages and Literatures in Dialogue with Simon Gaunt (Rome: Viella, 2025). I have published various articles and book chapters on manuscripts, vernacular history, affective reading, tactile interactions with images, the medieval Trojan legend, the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy, and the role of smell in devotional poetry, among other things. Other teaching and research interests include medieval Occitan literature, ecocriticism in premodernity, and critical theory.

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Before my appointment at UC Berkeley, I served as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge from 2021 to 2023. Before that I held short postdoctoral posts at Freie Universität Berlin and King's College London, where I received my PhD in French in 2020.

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