Michael Twomey

Retired Dana Professor, English
Specialty: Medieval Literature, the Bible, the English language, Latin

Public web page:

Recent lectures and publications:

"The Exemplary Environment of Bartholomaeus Anglicus," in Reading the Natural World in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Perspectives on Ecology and the Environment, ed. Thomas Willard, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 46 (Turnhout, BE: Brepols, 2020), pp. 71-88.  Read the summary in my Environmental Humanities section.

"John Trevisa," in Oxford Bibliographies, section "Medieval Studies," ed. Paul E. Szarmach (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). DOI 10.1093/obo/9780195396584-0279.

"Practicing Ecocriticism" and "How the Forest Became the Wilderness," Bethany College, Bethany WV, 24 September 2019.  Read the summaries in my Environmental Humanities section.

“Night, Moonlight, and Genre in Le Morte Darthur,” at the Malory at 550: Old and New conference, Acadia University, Wolfville NS Canada, 8 August, 2019.

“Practicing Ecocriticism,” Svartárkot Culture/Nature Program, Kiðagil, Bárðardalur, Northern Iceland, August 2018. Read the summary in my Environmental Humanities section.

"Palimpsest, Confession, Palinode, Retraction: A Taxonomy of Arthurian Revision" 25th Congress of the International Arthurian Society in Würzburg, Germany, 27 July 2017.  Published as "Retraction and the Making of Arthurian Texts," Arthuriana 29.1 (2019), 10-23.

“Bartholomaeus Anglicus.” Oxford Bibliographies Online, in “Medieval Studies,” ed. Paul E. Szarmach.  New York:  Oxford University Press, 2017-03-30. DOI 10.1093/obo/9780195396584-0225.

"Architectural Satire in the Tales of the Miller and Reeve," Chaucer Review 51.3 (2016), 310-37, co-authored with medieval archeologist Scott Stull (IC and SUNY Cortland) (available in Project Muse).

The newest edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in The Works of the Gawain Poet, edited by Ad Putter and Myra Stokes of the University of Bristol, UK (London: Penguin, 2014), adopts my reading of the manuscript's version of the name of Morgan le Fay in lines 2446 and 2452:  "Morgue la faye."  Moreover, the editors' note to these lines gives a lengthy summary of my argument for this reading, which appeared in the journal Anglia 117 (1999), 542-57. 

Charles A. Dana Professor of Humanities and Arts, Emeritus