- PhD French, King's College London (2020)
- MA French Literature and Culture, King's College London (2016)
- BA French and History, King's College London (2015)
Prior to joining UC Berkeley, I was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge (2021–23), a Postdoctoral Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin (2020–21), and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at King's College London (2020).
Office Hours: Fall 2025: Wednesdays, 3-5pm (4217 Dwinelle) (book: calendly.com/hravenhall)
Selected Publications
(edited with Hannah Morcos, Maria Teresa Rachetta, Natasha Romanova, and Simone Ventura) The Values of the Vernacular: Essays in Medieval Romance Languages and Literatures in Dialogue with Simon Gaunt (Rome: Viella, 2025).
“Was Drouart la Vache, author of the Livre d’amour (1290), ‘le Roi de Soissons’?” Romania, 142 (2024), 365–82.
(with Giulia Boitani) “A Hospitaller Book in Fifteenth-Century Florence: Notes on the Owners of Cologny, Bodmer 147,” Medioevo Romanzo, 48 (2024), 335–61.
“Defacing Troy: From Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece to Medieval Manuscripts,” Anglia, 142.3 (2024), 548–72.
(with Andrew James Johnston and Wolfram R. Keller) “Introduction: Touching Troy,” Anglia, 142.3 (2024), 419–27.
“Gautier de Coinci's Miracles de Nostre Dame and the Powers of Olfaction,” New Medieval Literatures, 24 (2024), 60–100.
“Veiled Reading, Reading Veils: Textile Curtains and the Experiences of Medieval French Manuscripts, 1200–1325,” Digital Philology, 12.2 (2023), 155–94.
“The Date, Author, and Context of the Roman de Silence: A Reassessment,” Medium Ævum, 91 (2022), 70–99.
“All Roads Lead to Rome: Revisiting the Pairing of the Histoire ancienne jusqu'à César and the Faits des Romains in the Thirteenth Century,” Romania, 139 (2021), 5–36.
“The Untimely Subject: Reporting Discourse and Bearing Witness in Villehardouin's La Conquête de Constantinople and Yannick Haenel's Jan Karski,” Interfaces, 7 (2020), 9–36.
The Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César: A Digital Edition; BNF, Fr20125 (interpretive edition): Orient II (8) and Alexander (9), ed. by Henry Ravenhall, Simon Gaunt, Simone Ventura, Maria Teresa Rachetta, Natasha Romanova and Hannah Morcos; technical ed. by Paul Caton, Ginestra Ferraro, Marcus Husar, and Geoffroy Noël.
(For more on my research, please visit my website).
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.
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.
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.
