Dr Timothy Glover

Timothy Glover is a cultural historian and literary critic of late-medieval England and Europe. Before coming to Cambridge, he spent eight years at the University of Oxford, completing a BA in English Literature, MSt in English (650–1550), and DPhil. He also studied at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he took a Mellon Post-Baccalaureate in Post-Classical Latin.

He works primarily on the textual and material forms of late-medieval religious writings. In 2021–2024, he was a Research Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he completed his first monograph, which asks why many late-medieval texts seem puzzlingly disorganised to modern readers. It focuses on the sprawling prose forms of Richard Rolle, a fourteenth-century hermit who became one of medieval England's most popular writers. Where past scholars have understood Rolle's prose as reflecting his idiosyncratic and effusive personality, this book argues that it reflects normative kinds of compilatory writings, especially those produced outside of academic centres. Making this argument in turn enables a wider intervention: scholarly paradigms for understanding medieval compilation have shaped our understanding of how late-medieval books became increasingly better organised and how the modern concept of the author emerged (as something defined against the compiler). However, these paradigms were largely derived from academic theological books. By contrast, focusing instead on compilatory writing beyond the universities enables us to consider why late-medieval readers sometimes benefitted from miscellaneous forms and how compilation itself functioned as a (distinctly medieval) mode of authorship.

His project at the Parker Library represents an extension of this project, focusing now on compilation at the level of the material book. He is interested in examples where scribes counter-intuitively neglect the organisation of their sources and in the reasons why miscellaneity may have been something to embrace, rather than an unwanted by-product of the complex processes of compiling books. His particular focus is on the Parker Library’s priests’ books—a stratum of manuscripts in which medieval scribes routinely refashioned authoritative pastoral manuals into much looser, more ad hoc forms, catering for new reading contexts beyond systematic academic study. These books offer insights into why late-medieval readers sometimes benefitted from miscellaneous books.