Professor Anthony Bale

(Elected 2024)

Professor Anthony Bale: scholar, writer, editor, translator, teacher, broadcaster, curator, performer, world-wanderer, long-time Professor of Medieval Studies, one-time Executive Dean of the School of Arts and recent Governor of Birkbeck, University of London.

How do we honour a man of such varied distinction? We could follow his approach to research, by writing the biography, taking a cue from the one he published on Margery Kempe. A brief sketch would track how Bale joined Birkbeck's Department of English and Humanities on 1 January 2003, becoming Professor in 2013, delivering an inaugural lecture at the tender age of thirty-eight, which his then Executive Dean described as 'quite simply the best I have ever heard.' Over the course of his career at Birkbeck, Bale held numerous leadership positions, including Assistant Dean for Postgraduate Research and Assistant Dean for Research, Deputy and Acting Dean, and ultimately Dean. It would describe how Bale expanded the teaching of Medieval Studies at Birkbeck, and how he became a leading international figure for his research in the field, including via his involvement in the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Worlds, and his supervision of numerous PhD projects, which supported the consolidation of Birkbeck's global reputation as a centre of excellence for English Literature and the arts and humanities more broadly.

Bale's scholarship is celebrated for its pioneering interdisciplinarity, which draws on literature, visual culture, history, interfaith relations and medical humanities, approaches which were already evident in his early books, including The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms 1350–1500 (2006) and Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages (2010). It is equally lauded for its capacity to reach a wide range of audiences: students, academics, curious members of the public, including those who may have quietly presumed that the Middle Ages could fade from view.

Bale has won an extraordinary range of awards, making him one of Birkbeck's most decorated academics ever, and one of the trailblazers of his generation, from bodies such as the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Australian Research Council, the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, including the prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2011. While academics with such stellar records might easily retreat to the sweet intoxication of the archive, Bale has demonstrated a steadfast commitment to his institution and his discipline, from being a founding member of Out@Birkbeck to more recently serving as President of the New Chaucer Society. Wanderers, like Bale, find themselves at all sorts of surprising intersections.

But following Bale's lead, we could also try to map a travel guide, like the ones he published on Medieval pilgrimage, including Margery Kempe: a Mixed Life (2021), Medieval English Travel: a Critical Anthology (with Sebastian Sobecki, 2019), The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the Crusades (2019), and editions of The Book of Margery Kempe (2015) and The Book of Marvels and Travels (2012), and his bestselling latest book, A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages. This might begin with his own expedition from Kent, where he was born, to Staffordshire in 1979, when his father took up an academic position at Keele University. Bale enrolled in the University of Oxford as an undergraduate, completing his MA studies in 1997, followed by an MA at the University of York in 1998, before returning to Oxford to complete his DPhil in 2001, where he met his partner Tim. Bale's chronicling of the journeys of Medieval pilgrims has taken him on many trips of his own, to trace the steps of those he studies. This travel has included visiting appointments at some of the world's most distinguished institutions, including Harvard University, the University of Wisconsin- Madison, the University of Melbourne, the University of Michigan, the National Humanities Centre, North Carolina, and the Huntington Library, California.

Or we could endeavour to curate an exhibition, drawing inspiration from his own, including Capsule: Inside the Medieval Book, at Birkbeck's Peltz Gallery in (2018), which saw Bale collaborate with artist Shay Hamias to animate four rare books he discovered in the College library. We might present Blood: Uniting & Dividing, held at the Jewish Museum (2015-16), which generated unprecedented critical acclaim, with over 11,000 attendees, and was supported by the book Blood: Reflections on What Unites and Divides Us (with David Feldman, 2015). Jews, Money, Myth won the prestigious 'Museums Change Lives' award in 2019, attracting over 20,000 visitors at a time of rising antisemitism. With such a display, we would witness the rich visual documentation that underpins Bale's research – photographs, prints, drawings, digital animations, often collaboratively produced – which renders his work lively, capacious and engaging. But we would be remiss not to feature Bale's social media accounts – Instagram, X, Bluesky – which record, in visual form, his busy research itinerary. Occasionally, they might even capture his purring editorial assistant Benny, filing papers with his zippy paws; successor to the much-missed Percy.

We could assemble a performance archive, that captures the diverse ways Bale has communicated his research via lectures, talks, and media appearances, including on BBC's In Our Time and Front Row. Shortly after Bale joined Birkbeck, colleagues recall how he lent his voice to the video game Age of Empires, traipsing with a group of Medievalists from Bloomsbury to Soho, to perform as soldiers, ploughmen and monks. Perhaps Bale's greatest achievement in period performance, however, was his role as the tuxedoed Charles Cameron in the English department's 2012 production of Virginia Woolf's play Freshwater, set in the buildings in which she once resided, a part I am assured he played with 'conviction.'

You can come to know Bale via his dazzling array of accomplishments, certainly, but do you ever really know a man until you've heard him sing Meat Loaf after midnight? For while Bale is indeed a brilliant academic, he has also been a spirited colleague, who has played a pivotal role in encouraging us to come together socially as co-workers and friends.

In less enlightened corners of the planet, there are those who would have us believe that what it means to be human doesn't matter; that history belongs to the past; that the literature, art, and culture don't count. But Bale's research enacts a powerful and public defence against this ignorance. Violence, conflict, justice, faith, emotion, travel, the glow of worlds beyond the horizon of our bounded lives are all themes of Bale's work in Medieval Studies, which he reminds us are often also at the heart of contemporary concerns. His riveting A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages illuminated the windows of Bloomsbury's Waterstones for months, becoming the bookshop's paperback of the year (2024) and has so far been translated into twenty languages. The text has been met with widespread praise, including by The Times for Bale's 'diligent crafting of perfect prose.'

Bale 'has been an extraordinary ambassador for the arts and humanities at Birkbeck, and an extraordinary ambassador outside of our community.' Birkbeck has been indelibly shaped by Bale's standards of academic excellence, his restless inquiry, his diplomatic leadership, his infectious positivity and his buoyant conviviality. We honour the wealth of his contributions to Birkbeck, while signalling our commitment to remember them, value them and continue to learn from them, whatever routes open up before us.