Dr Alexis Statz
Position:
Postdoctoral Affiliate
Department / Section:
French
Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages & Linguistics Ìý
Email address:
College:
St John’s College
About:
Alexis Statz is a medievalist and a Postdoctoral Affiliate in the French section of the MMLL Faculty. She lectures and offers supervisions in both the MMLL and the English Faculties. ÌýÌý
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Research Interests:
Alexis’s work is broadly interdisciplinary. Her doctoral thesis, completed at the ÃÜÌÒÊÓƵ in 2024, is entitled ‘The Pastoral Image: Guillaume de Deguileville’s Spiritual Pedagogy in the ±Êè±ô±ð°ù¾±²Ô²¹²µ±ð Allegories’. The thesis analyses the Cistercian monk and poet Guillaume de Deguileville’s three dream-visions: the ±Êè±ô±ð°ù¾±²Ô²¹²µ±ð de vie humaine (1330 and 1355), the ±Êè±ô±ð°ù¾±²Ô²¹²µ±ð de l’âme (1355), and the ±Êè±ô±ð°ù¾±²Ô²¹²µ±ð de Jesus-Christ (1358). It argues that the allegories engage with the materiality of the Christian sacraments through striking pedagogical imagery, or ‘sacramental craft’, and are deeply embedded in both Cistercian mysticism and the tradition of pastoral care.
More recently, Alexis’s research interests have turned to medieval theories of cognition and the visual representation of knowledge. This led her to publish her forthcoming article in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies on diagrams and spiritual cognition in Deguileville’s writings. More generally, she is interested in image-theory, and how images were used to visualise scientific, philosophical, cosmological, and theological concerns in the literary and manuscript culture of the Middle Ages. She is currently developing a new project Ìýthat focuses on the thirteenth-century diagrammatic encyclopaedia L’Image du monde by Gautier de Metz.
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Publications:
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Peer-Reviewed Article:
‘Spiritual Diagrams and Cognition in the Writings of Guillaume de Deguileville’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 56:2 (2026) (forthcoming)
Book Review:
‘Marco Nievergelt, Medieval Allegory as Epistemology: Dream-Vision Poetry on Language, Cognition, and Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023)’, Medium Aevum (forthcoming)
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