Arthur Bahr

Professor

Arthur Bahr studies medieval literature, and especially enjoys reading old books as if they were poems: that is, for how their constituent parts (texts and pages of a manuscript, like lines and stanzas of a poem) work together to create a whole that is more interesting than any of those parts would be in isolation. More fancily put, he blends formalist and materialist approaches in order to find literary resonance in the physical particularities of medieval manuscripts.

He is the author of Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript: Speculation, Shapes, Delight (University of Chicago Press, 2024); Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London (University of Chicago Press, 2013); and co-editor of Medieval English Manuscripts: Form, Aesthetics, and the Literary Text, a special volume of The Chaucer Review (47.4, April 2013). His essays have appeared in ELH, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Studies in Philology, and The Chaucer Review, among others. His next project combines his interest in manuscripts with his training as a figure skating judge to explore analogies between sheets of parchment and sheets of ice, as sites of performance, inscription, and erasure.

Bahr has served MIT as Chair of the Committee on the Undergraduate Program (2019-21), in which capacity he was a member of the emergency Academic Policies and Regulations Team (APART) during the Covid-19 pandemic. He served in the Education Group of Task Force 2021 and Beyond, chairing one of its subgroups; and on the subsequent Refinement and Implementation Committee on the Undergraduate Program. He has been Chair and Co-Chair of Ancient and Medieval Studies, and Curriculum Chair and Undergraduate Officer of Literature.

Subjects

Subjects taught the current academic year:

21.01 Compass Course: Moral and Social Questions about the Human Condition: Love, Death, and Taxes: How to Think – and Talk to Others – About Being Human (NEW) (Spring 2025)

21L.004 Reading Poetry (Fall 2024)

21L.601[J] Old English and Beowulf (Fall 2024)

21L.S89 Special Subject in Literature: *Beowulf* and *Judith* (Spring 2025)

Subjects taught in recent years:

21L.601[J] Old English and Beowulf (Spring 2023)

Research Interests

I’m interested in what the structure of medieval manuscripts can tell us about the texts that they contain: what interpretive strategies they suggest or enable, especially as contrasted with those normalized by the printing press and consequent mass production of literary texts. As hand-crafted objects that are nearly always the collaborative result of multiple agents (patron, author, scribe, decorator, etc.), each manuscript offers a unique constellation of literary and historical forces. Learning from, and finding beauty in, the material traces of those forces has animated much of my scholarly work thus far.

Only very rarely, however, can we securely recover the precise intentions that led to a given manuscript’s current shape. The temporal and cultural distance from which we must contemplate our objects of study thus frequently demands some degree, or form, of speculation. Medieval and modern theories of speculation therefore inform my current study of the so-called Pearl-Manuscript (British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x/2, to be precise), the only surviving copy of four beautiful Middle English poems, including Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Analogies between the book itself and the poems it contains are too numerous and too resonant to be dismissed; yet they cannot be attributed to a single author-figure, and many of them were created by chance (or Providence). My second book explores these paradoxes, using the Pearl-Manuscript as a lens for better understanding and appreciating the artistry of the poems it contains.

Publications

Books

Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 285 pages. Paperback edition published 2015.

Co-editor, with Alexandra Gillespie, Medieval English Manuscripts: Form, Aesthetics, and the Literary Text. Special issue of The Chaucer Review (47.4, April 2013).

Chasing the Pearl Manuscript: Speculation, Shapes, Delight. In progress, currently ca. 115,000 words. Submission expected Spring 2022.

Articles and Essays

“Birdsong, Love, and the House of Lancaster: Gower Reads Chaucer,” in Chaucer and the Subversion of Form, ed. Thomas Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 165-181.

“Teaching Pearl with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” in Approaches to Teaching
the Middle English Pearl, ed. Jane Beal and Mark Bradshaw Busbee, (New York:
Modern Language Association of America, 2018), 131-138.

Awards

MacVicar Faculty Fellowship (2015)
External Faculty Fellow, Newhouse Center for the Humanities
(Wellesley College, 2014-15)
Alfred Henry and Jean Morrison Hayes Career Development Chair (2012-15)
James A. and Ruth Levitan Award for Excellence in Teaching (2012)
Fulbright Fellow (Iceland)

Talks

What Is a Text in the Pearl-Manuscript?,” University of Düsseldorf, 2021
Teaching Literature through a Pandemic,” New England Medieval Conference, 2021
Little Lewis’s Astrolabe,” New Chaucer Society Expo, 2021
The Pearl-Manuscript as Kaleidoscope,” University of Washington, 2020.
Sir Gawain, Chaucer’s Squire, and the Ends of Cotton Nero A.x,” Bowdoin College, 2018.
In Praise of Speculation,” University of Pennsylvania, 2018.
Teaching Miscellanies,” Renaissance Society of America, 2018.
Some Temporal Problems with Patience,” Harvard University, 2018.
The Pearl-Manuscript and the Consolations of Geometry,” Rutgers University, 2017.
Sheets of Parchment, Sheets of Ice; Or, Why Book History and Figure Skating Must Be in Dialogue,” University of Texas, Austin, 2017.

Additional Information

Medieval Studies and Form: Bahr is a member of FORMER, a collaborative group of medievalists whose work is variously inspired by literary form and aesthetics. Other members include Seeta Chaganti (UC-Davis), Rebecca Davis (UC-Irvine), Shannon Gayk (Indiana U), Eleanor Johnson (Columbia U), Marisa Libbon (Bard C), Ingrid Nelson (Amherst C), Sarah Novacich (Rutgers U), and Jennifer Sisk (U of Vermont).

AMS@MIT: At MIT, Bahr has worked with colleagues from across the Institute to strengthen and expand MIT’s program in Ancient and Medieval Studies (AMS@MIT). This initiative has involved bringing Latin instruction to campus, launching a monthly colloquium series of distinguished speakers from art history, musicology, literature, history, and philosophy, and designing “Empire,” a team-taught, interdisciplinary exploration of the representation and reality of pre-modern empires.

Elsewhere: Arthur can also be found serving as a National judge with the United States Figure Skating Association; undertaking long, involved, and sometimes overly ambitious cooking projects; and listening to Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, various Icelandic bands (m√∫m, Of Monsters and Men, amiina), and a wide range of baroque opera. He misses his much-loved, recently departed cat Alcina very much, and he wants the world to know that he was devoted to Betty White long before she was all the rage.

Why study medieval literature?

How are medieval manuscripts like snowflakes?