Research Bio

Henry Ravenhall is Assistant Professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a specialist of medieval French literature and culture, and his research focuses on the role of manuscript materiality in shaping the way readers engaged with stories and ideas. 

His first book project, Anachrony and Assemblage: Reading Manuscript Culture in Medieval Soissons, tells the story of a fascinating French manuscript 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.

His 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.

He has published various articles and book chapters on medieval 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.

Before his appointment at UC Berkeley, he served as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge from 2021 to 2023. Before that he held short postdoctoral posts at Freie Universität Berlin and King's College London, where he was awarded his PhD in French in 2020.

Research Expertise and Interest

medieval French literature, Rare Books and Manuscripts, critical theory, French literature, medieval Occitan literature