David Townsend

Emeriti Faculty

Professor, Department of English & Centre for Medieval Studies

416-978-6776

david.townsend@utoronto.ca Website

Room 321
Centre for Medieval Studies, Lillian Massey Building, 125 Queen's Park, Toronto, ON M5S 2C7
Campus: St. George

David Townsend is Professor Medieval Studies and English. His published work includes the edition and translation of medieval texts, the study of medieval manuscripts, and the relevance of gender theory and queer theory to medieval literature. He was founding director of the Sexual Diversity Studies Program at University College and now serves on the advisory committee of the Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. He is a member of the editorial boards of the journals Exemplaria and Journal of Medieval Latin and of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (Harvard University Press). He is general editor of the Toronto Medieval Latin Texts.

Education

• PhD, University of Toronto
• MA, University of Toronto
• BA, Valparaiso University

Research Interests

• Editing and interpretation of medieval Latin texts
• especially of hagiography and narrative poetry
• gender and sexuality in medieval literature
• Middle English devotional literature

Publications

• John of Glastonbury, Cronica sive antiquitates Glastoniensis ecclesie, ed. James Carley, trans. David Townsend (Boydell and Brewer, 1985).
• The Tongue of the Fathers: Gender and Ideology in Twelfth-Century Latin. Ed. David Townsend and Andrew Taylor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998).
• The Alexandreis: A Twelfth-Century Epic (Broadview: Peterborough, 2006).
• An Epitome of Biblical History: Glosses on Walter of Châtillon's Alexandreis, 4.176-274 from British Library Add. MS 18,217. Toronto Medieval Latin Texts 30 (Toronto: PIMS, 2008).
• The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Latin Literature. Ed. Ralph J. Hexter and David Townsend (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
• "The Ovidian Verse Epistles of Master Leonius" Journal of Medieval Latin 10 (2000): 239-254.
• "Ovidian Homoerotics in Twelfth-Century Paris: The Letters of Leoninus, Poet and Polyphone." GLQ 8:3 (2002): 389-423.
• "The Naked Truth of the King's Affection in the Old English Apollonius of Tyre," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34.1 (Winter 2004): 173-195.
• "Scandals of Translation, Pragmatics of Desire," New Medieval Literatures 9 (2007): 207-211.
• "Paratext, Ambiguity, and Interpretive Foreclosure in Manuscripts of Walter of Châtillon's Alexandreis," New Medieval Literatures 14 (2012): forthcoming.