Dr. Joseph Grossi

Bio

I received my Ph.D. from Ohio State University in 1999 with a dissertation entitled "Uncommon Fatherland: Medieval English Perceptions of Rome and Italy." Before arriving at the University of Victoria in 2007, I taught at Ohio State, the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Genoa (Italy), Providence College (Rhode Island), and, most recently, Canisius College (Buffalo, NY).

Research Profile

I specialize in Old and Middle English literature. At UVic I teach courses in the English Department, the Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies, and the Medieval Studies Program.

Principal Teaching Areas

My teaching and scholarly interests include Old and Middle English literature, medieval East Anglia, cultural geography, palaeography and codicology, and Italian language and literature.

Selected publications 

Books

• Angles on a Kingdom: East Anglian Identities from Bede to Ælfric. University of Toronto Press: Toronto (2021). https://utorontopress.com/ca/angles-on-a-kingdom-3

 Articles and book chapters

• "Dante, Peacemaker fo the Lunigiana." Dante Studies 139 (2021), pp. 58-93. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/872081
• Invited articles on the Old English Durham and the Durham Proverbs, for The Encyclopaedia of Medieval British Literature.  Ed. Siân Echard and Robert Rouse.  Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, in preparation.
• "Barrow Exegesis: Quotation, Chorography and Felix's Life of St. Guthlac."  Florilegium 30 (2013): 143-65.
• "A Place of 'Long-Lasting Evil and Unhappiness':  Rædwald's East Anglia in Bede's Ecclesiastical History."  New Medieval Literatures 15 (2013): 95-118.
• "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 (JEGP) 111 (2012): 42-73.
• "Cloistered Lydgate, Commercial Scribe: British Library Harley 2255 Revisited." Mediaeval Studies 72 (2010): 313-61.
• "'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 (2002): 298-309.“
• "The Question of the King's Grace in the Alliterative Morte Arthure, 2320." Notes and Queries 245 (2000): 293-5.
• Postscript/corrigenda in Notes and Queries 246 (2001): 40-41.
• "The Clerk vs. the Wife of Bath: Nominalism, Carnival and Chaucer's Last Laugh." In Literary Nominalism and the Theory of Rereading Late Medieval Texts: A New Research Paradigm. Ed. Richard J. Utz. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995. 147-78.

Works in progress

• "Felix and His Kings."  Invited contribution to the volume Guthlac of Crowland: Celebrating 1300 Years.  Ed. Alan Thacker and Jane Roberts.  Donington, Lincs, UK: Shaun Tyas.  In preparation.