Lee Manion
Lee Manion
Ph.D. University of Virginia
B.A. Duke University
Medieval and early modern English and Scottish literature; narrative and form; romance, drama, and epic; political thought and sovereignty; crusading literature
Lee Manion received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. He is a winner of the William T. Kemper Award for Teaching Excellence and the 2021 MU A&S Associate Professor of the Year Award. His first book, Narrating the Crusades: Loss and Recovery in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge UP, 2014), which analyzes medieval crusading romances and their influence on Renaissance authors such as Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare, won the NeMLA Book Award. His second book, The Recognition of Sovereignty: Politics of Empire in Medieval and Early Modern Anglo-Scottish Literature (under contract and complete at Cambridge UP), examines literature's influence on theories of sovereignty in England and Scotland through the use of recognition scenes. His new book project, Transformative Romance, studies the premodern romance's role as a cluster of symbiotic rewritings of other forms across periods and cultures.
In 2013-14 he was an NEH fellow at the National Humanities Center. His article "The Loss of the Holy Land and Sir Isumbras: Literary Contributions to Fourteenth-Century Crusade Discourse" won the Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize for best first article in the field of medieval studies from the Medieval Academy in 2012. He has also received an Institute of Historical Research Mellon Fellowship and is a contributing editor to The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (for Cambridge University Press). His teaching interests include romance, Chaucer, Older Scots verse and prose, Shakespeare, Spenser, Wroth, and topics in legal and political thought.
Courses Taught:
ENGL 8220: Resistance, Rebellion, and Revolution in Premodern Britain
ENGL 4996: Honors Seminar in English
ENGL 2200H: Troy: History and Myth
ENGL 4167/7167: Shakespeare: Tragedies and Romances
ENGL 4210: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
ENGL 8210: Crusading in Medieval and Early Modern Culture
ENGL 3110: Arthurian Legends, Past and Present
ENGL 4166/7166: Shakespeare: Comedies and Histories
ENGL 4106/7106: Medieval and Renaissance Romance
ENGL 4970: Senior Capstone
ENGL 4166/7166: Chaucer and Spenser
ENGL 3200: Survey of British Literature, Beginnings to 1784
William T. Kemper Fellow, 2023
MU Arts & Science Associate Professor of the Year, 2021
Kircher Faculty Fellowship, 2021
Davidson Faculty Fellowship, 2018
MU Arts & Science Faculty Fellowship, 2015-16
MU Research Council Summer Research Grant, 2015
NEH Fellowship at the National Humanities Center, 2013-14
NeMLA Book Award, 2013
Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize, Medieval Academy of America, 2012
“The Crusading Romance in Britain: Religious Violence and the Transformation of Popular Chivalric Narratives,” The New Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. Roberta L. Krueger (Cambridge UP, 2023), pp. 101-18
“Scottish Narratives of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages: Re-Imagining 'Fredome',” Scottish Literary Review 11.2 (2019): 1-24
“Renaissance Crusading Literature: Memory, Translation, and Adaptation,” The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the Crusades, ed. Anthony Bale (Cambridge UP, 2019), pp. 232-47
“The Crusading Romance in Early Modern England: Converting the Past in Berners's Huon of Bordeaux and Johnson's Seven Champions of Christendom,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 48.3 (2018): 491-517
“Thinking Through the English Crusading Romance: Sir Gowther and the Baltic,” Thinking Medieval Romance, ed. Katherine Little and Nicola McDonald (Oxford UP, 2018), pp. 68-90
“'Perpetuel Memorye': Remembering History in the Crusading Romance,” Remembering the Crusades and Crusading, ed. Megan Cassidy-Welch (Routledge, 2016), pp. 114-28
Narrating the Crusades: Loss and Recovery in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge UP, 2014)
"Sovereign Recognition: Contesting Political Claims in the Alliterative Morte Arthure and The Awntyrs off Arthur," Law and Sovereignty in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Robert Sturges (Brepols, 2011), pp. 69-91
"The Loss of the Holy Land and Sir Isumbras: Literary Contributions to Fourteenth-Century Crusade Discourse," Speculum 85.1 (2010): 65-90