 | Dr John Marenbon
Senior Research Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge (H2) The history of philosophy, especially c.500 – c.1700, with a focus on Boethius, Anselm and Abelard, but including philosophers up to Leibniz
My CV is very dull - after studying at Trinity College, Cambridge, I became a Fellow there when I was 23, and I have remained one ever since. Beneath this monotonous surface, however, there is a quite unusual story. I arrived at Cambridge as an undergraduate fascinated by philosophy, and fascinated also by the Middle Ages. My initial attempt to put the two interests together by studying philosophy failed: philosophy at Cambridge was then (even more so than now) taught without regard for its history. And so I ended by taking a medley of medieval language and literature courses, and finally doing a rather unphilosophical doctorate on philosophy in the early Middle Ages. In the years since, I have tried to learn more philosophy, of all types, as well as to understand better and write about some parts of medieval philosophy (which I take in a very broad sense, as stretching from c.200 to c. 1700). Although I have many other interests, such as literature, music, art and cooking, my passion is my subject. It’s a subject one needs to pursue with passion, because – strangely for so large a field of intellectual endeavour – it still falls outside what is regularly studied in universities, at least in the UK. My main task is try to make others share my enthusiasm. I am therefore particularly excited about an Oxford Handbook of Medieval Philosophy I am currently editing, which is designed to show the links between medieval philosophy and the concerns of contemporary Anglophone philosophers. Institutionally, too, my story is strange, because I have been never been employed by ‘my’ university – Cambridge – or any other. I have, from the beginning, been an employee of my college, Trinity, briefly as a research fellow, for 25 years as a teaching fellow and now again as a research fellow. It is due to Trinity’s patronage, and the imaginative arrangement of using me to teach for the college in one subject (English) while I continued with my research and writing on medieval philosophy, which has allowed me to have an academic career in Britain. These two sides to my story explain why I am so pleased to be elected a Fellow of the British Academy. It will help me, I hope, to advance the cause of medieval philosophy and foster efforts to generate more interest in the area. And it is especially welcome as a mark of external recognition for someone whose college, without the University’s support, has provided with his academic home. |
