Matthew Goldie

Dr. Matthew Boyd Goldie specializes in Middle English literature. He is the author of Scribes of Space: Place in Middle English Literature and Late Medieval Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), The Idea of the Antipodes: Place, People, and Voices (Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures, 2010) and Middle English Literature: A Historical Sourcebook (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003) as well as articles on Middle English literature and medieval travel and geography. He teaches medieval literature, poetry, history of the English language, food writing, and film courses.

Education

Ph.D. English, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY)
Certificate in Medieval Studies, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY)
M.F.A. Creative Writing (Poetry), Brooklyn College, CUNY
B.A. English and Philosophy, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand

Publications - Academic

Books/Journal Issues

2019

Scribes of Space: Place in Middle English Literature and Late Medieval Science. Cornell: Cornell University Press.

Scribes of Space posits that the conception of space—the everyday physical areas we perceive and through which we move—underwent critical transformations between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. The book examines how natural philosophers, theologians, poets, and other thinkers in late medieval Britain altered the ideas about geographical space they inherited from the ancient world. In tracing the causes and nature of these developments, and how geographical space was consequently understood, this study focuses on the intersection of medieval science, theology, and literature, bringing a wide range of writings—scientific works by Nicole Oresme, Jean Buridan, the Merton School of Oxford Calculators, and Thomas Bradwardine; spiritual, poetic, and travel writings by John Lydgate, Robert Henryson, Margery Kempe, the Mandeville author, and Geoffrey Chaucer—into conversation. This pairing of physics and literature uncovers how the understanding of spatial boundaries, locality, elevation, motion, and proximity shifted across time, signaling the emergence of a new spatial imagination during this era.

2018

Colloquium: London Living, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, volume 40, co-edited with Sarah Stanbury.

2016

Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, volume 7, issue 4: Special Issue: Our Sea of Islands: New Approaches to British Insularity in the Late Middle Ages, co-edited with Sebastian I. Sobecki.

2010

The Idea of the Antipodes: Place, People, and Voices. Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures New York: Routledge.

This study uses critical theory to investigate the history of how people have thought about the antipodes—the places and people on the other side of the world—from ancient Greece to present-day literature and digital media. Taking into account maps, letters, book illustrations, travel writing, poetry, and drama, the study reveals that the history of the idea of the antipodes might be seen as different modes or discourses: mathematical and geographical in the earliest era, cartographical and kinetic in the medieval period, social and sexual in the Early Modern, sartorial and littoral in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and bodily and humorous in the latest era. Using the theories of Eve Sedgwick, Michel Foucault, Epeli Hau‘ofa, and others, this book extends postcolonialism’s historical scope and challenges the theory’s approaches and perceptions: center-periphery, East-West, and mimicry.

2003

Middle English Literature: A Historical Sourcebook. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

2006

Second edition.

This collection of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century documents is designed for students of Chaucer and Middle English literature. It makes readily available accounts of key historical events and descriptions of pertinent cultural phenomena. The documents have been chosen to complement the themes and styles that appear in the literature, enabling students to compare fourteenth- and fifteenth-century creative writing with contemporary debates on a range of important topics such as friars, marriage, Lollardy, the perception of non-Western others, lechery, the revolt of 1381, books, and the English language.

Articles and Chapters

2022: “Maps and the Medieval World at Large.” The Routledge Companion to Medieval English Literature. Ed. Raluca Radulescu and Sif Rikhardsdottir. New York: Routledge.
2021: “‘Oute of mesure’: ‘Alone walkyng’ and Syncategoremata.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 43.
2020: “Mutable, Associative, and Ugly: Oceanic Feelings in Middle English Literature and Medieval Natural Science.” The Routledge Companion to Marine and Maritime Worlds, 1400–1800. Ed. Claire Jowitt, Craig Lambert, and Steve Mentz. New York: Routledge.
2019: “Encounters.” Medieval English Travel: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Anthony Bale and Sebastian Sobecki. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2018: “Spatial History: Estres, Edges, and Contents.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 40.
2015: “An Early English Rutter: The Sea and Spatial Hermeneutics in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.” Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 90.3.
2012: “Neurobiological Alphabets: Language Origins and the Problem of Universals.” postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies. 3.3 (Special Issue: Cognitive Alterities/Neuromedievalism)

Reviews

2023: Emily Steiner. John Trevisa’s Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400. Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Studies in the Age of Chaucer.
2021: Dan Terkla and Nick Millea, eds. A Critical Companion to Mappae Mundi of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Boydell Studies in Medieval Art and Architecture. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer 2019. The Journal of English and Germanic Philology.
2018: Shayne Aaron Legassie. The Medieval Invention of Travel. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017. The Medieval Review. McMahon, Elizabeth. Islands, Identity and the Literary Imagination. Anthem Studies in Australian Literature and Culture. Anthem Press, 2016. Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature JASAL.
2016: Shirin A. Khanmohamadi. In Light of Another's World: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Studies in the Age of Chaucer.
2012: Andrea Grafetstätter, Sieglinde Hartmann, and James Ogier, ed. Islands and Cities in Medieval Myth, Literature and History. New York: Peter Lang, 2011. Island Studies Journal.
2010: Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Amilcare Iannucci, ed. Marco Polo and the Encounter of East and West. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Speculum. Martin Edmond. Zone of the Marvellous: In Search of the Antipodes Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2009. The Journal of New Zealand Literature.
2009: Pam Cook. Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2005. Quarterly Review of Film and Video. with Paula J. Massood

Fellowships, Other Scholarly Activities

2021: Rider University Summer Research Reimbursement
2020: Rider University Summer Research Fellowship
2016: Visitor’s Travel Grant, Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, The Hague, Netherlands
2016: Rider University Summer Research Reimbursement
2015: Rider University Summer Research Fellowship
2013: Rider University Summer Research Reimbursement
2012: Rider University Research Leave

Publications - Poetry

1987–2004:
- New Zealand journals: Salient, Writings II, Sport 2, Landfall: a New Zealand Quarterly 182, Poetry New Zealand 7, Poetry New Zealand 9, Landfall 197, Sport 32, Sport 35
- Australian journals: Meanjin
- U.S. journals: The Brooklyn Review 8 and 9
1992: Sheer. New York: The Kraine Gallery, 1992

Conferences: Presentations and Organization

2022

(July) “Lists, Form, and Thought? William of Worcestre’s Itineraries.” New Chaucer Society, Durham University, Durham, UK.
(January) “Cataloging Misogyny: Juliana Barnes’s Book, Gender, and Subversion.” Gender and Medieval Studies Conference: “Resilience, Persistence, and Agency,” The American University of Paris (online).
(January) “Positively Straunge.” Modern Language Association, Washington, DC.

2021

(May) “Late Medieval Objectivity and William of Worcestre’s Persona in His Itineraries.” 56th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo (online)