Jonathan Brent is the project manager for Practices of Commentary. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies in June 2021. His research focuses on revisionism, periodization, and anachronism in late medieval history-writing. His dissertation is a comprehensive study of Nicholas Trevet’s Cronicles (c. 1334), an Anglo-Norman universal history most widely known for adaptation by Chaucer in the Man of Law’s Tale.
Research related to commentary
The first chapter of Jonathan’s dissertation engages extensively with Vincent of Beauvais’ encyclopedic Speculum maius (“Great Mirror”) (c. 1244–1263), one of Trevet’s most trusted sources. A Dominican friar, Vincent had initially organized the SM as a series of entries on the virtues and vices, a format that would have made for easy reference conducive to the tasks of preaching and teaching. He soon came to realize, however, that this framework distorted “the complete nature of things,” and that the only organizational method suited to an integral representation of the created world was that of the Bible. He thus revised the SM in accordance with “the order of Holy Scripture,” and as such the disparate parts of his encyclopedia – individual “mirrors” covering the natural world, Christian doctrine, and universal history – unfold as Biblical commentary, with a treatise on “birds” for example falling on the Fifth Day and the events of human history falling between the expulsion of Adam and Eve and the Apocalypse. Vincent demonstrates the complex relationship in Latin Europe between historical exegesis and history-writing.
Alongside Lorenzo DiTommaso (Concordia University) and Colin McAllister (University of Colorado-Colorado Springs), and Francis X. Gummerlock, Jonathan is also co-authoring a conspectus of commentaries on the Apocalypse of John.
Other publications
“Constance and the Holy Land in the Cronicles of Nicholas Trevet.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 45 (forthcoming, 2023).
“Violence, Memory, and History: Geoffrey of Monmouth and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant.” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 8.3 (2021): pp. 323–344.
“The Copyist of Les Cronicles in Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, ms. VGG F6.” Journal of the Early Book Society 20 (2017): pp. 265–270.