David Lawton, professor emeritus of English, has been awarded the 2022 Sir Israel Gollancz Prize by the British Academy. Established in 1924, the prize acknowledges a significant work related to early English language and literature. The British Academy chose to award Lawton the prize not for a single book but instead in recognition of his significant lifetime contributions to the field of Middle English studies.
Lawton is a leading scholar of poetry and devotional literature written during the period between the Norman conquest of England and the late 15th century. He has published books about Geoffrey Chaucer (Chaucer’s Narrators, 1985), the history of the Bible in English (Faith, Text, and History: the Bible in English, 1990), and the rhetoric of blasphemy (Blasphemy, 1993). He edited numerous editions of Middle English alliterative poetry, including Joseph of Arimathea and The Siege of Jerusalem. In 1987, Lawton published the first major analysis of the poem Piers Plowman through the lens of literary theory at a time when medievalists rarely employed theory.
In 2019, Lawton published a new edition of Chaucer’s complete works for Norton. His most recent book, Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities explores the vernacular culture of the era of Chaucer and Langland, establishing a new framework for interpreting narrative voice in literature.
“I am grateful to the British Academy and deeply honoured to receive this prize in the name of Israel Gollancz, with whose work I have been familiar since my first steps as a researcher,” Lawton wrote in accepting the award. “It is honestly heartening to be cited for my ‘interventions’ in the field; these always feel risky, particularly for relatively junior scholars (as I was in the 1980s, when I made the first such interventions), and it’s important, I think, to encourage bravery in challenging received ideas.”
Over the course of his career, Lawton has held important service and leadership roles that shaped the field of medieval studies. He was the longest-serving executive director of the New Chaucer Society and co-founded the New Medieval Literatures journal. In addition to his position at Washington University in St. Louis, Lawton is a professor of English at Durham University in the United Kingdom. From 2009–10, he was the Leverhulme Professor of English at Oxford. He is a lifetime member of Clare Hall, Cambridge.
“It’s been an honor to have worked and taught alongside such a renowned scholar of medieval studies here at Washington University in St. Louis,” said Abram Van Engen, chair of English. “David demonstrates both the rigors and the joys of academic study in English, and it is a real pleasure to see this prestigious recognition for his lifetime contributions to the field.”
