Richard K. Emmerson is the former Executive Director of the Medieval Academy of America. He has taught at Georgetown University, Harvard University, Tufts University, and Western Washington University (where he chaired the Department of English). He has served as the Deputy Director of Fellowships at the National Endowment for the Humanities and been an editor of Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, Studies in Iconography, and Traditio: Studies in Ancient and Medieval History, Thought, and Religion.

Since taking his Ph.D. in English from Stanford University, he has pursued interdisciplinary research on medieval art, literature, and religion. His first book, Antichrist in the Middle Ages: A Study of Medieval Apocalypticism, Art, and Literature (1981), examined medieval and early reformation expectations regarding the end of the world and their representation in didactic and visionary poems, plays, paintings, romances, sermons, stained glass, and theological treatises. The Apocalyptic Imagination in Medieval Literature (with Ronald Herzman, 1992) studied Bonaventure’s Life of Francis, Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose, Dante’s Comedia, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. His interdisciplinary interests are also evident in the essays collected in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (edited with Bernard McGinn, 1993), while his interest in medieval drama resulted in Approaches to Teaching Medieval English Drama (1990) and the translation of a fourteenth-century French play, Antichrist and Judgment Day: The Middle French Jour du Jugement (edited with David F. Hult, 1998). He has also published more than thirty articles and essays in academic journals and scholarly collections. His most recent publication is Key Figures in Medieval Europe (Routledge Encyclopedias of the Middle Ages, vol. 13, 2006).

Over the past decade Emmerson’s scholarship has focused on the relationship of word and image in medieval English and French manuscripts, literary and devotional. His present project, “Medieval Literacies: Image, Language, and Ideology in Medieval English Illustrated Manuscripts,” studies the interdependence of visual and verbal texts in bilingual and trilingual manuscripts, the development of a vernacular iconography in English manuscripts, and the reception of these complex books by various interpretive communities in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Publications

Books

• Key Figures in Medieval Europe. Routledge Encyclopedias of the Middle Ages, vol. 13. Routledge, 2006. Edited with Sandra Clayton-Emmerson.
• Antichrist and Judgment Day: The Middle French Jour du Jugement. Early European Drama in Translation. Pegasus Press, 1998. Edited with David Hult.
• The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages. Cornell University Press, 1993. Edited with Bernard McGinn.
• The Apocalyptic Imagination in Medieval Literature. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. With Ronald B. Herzman. 
• Approaches to Teaching Medieval English Drama. Modern Language Association, 1990.
• Antichrist in the Middle Ages: A Study of Medieval Apocalypticism, Art, and Literature. University of Washington Press and Manchester University Press, 1981.

Essays in Scholarly Collections

• “Antichrist on Page and Stage in the Later Middle Ages.” In Spectacle and Public Performance in the Later Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Ed. Robert E. Stillman. E. J. Brill, 2006. Pp. 1-29.
• “Visualizing the Apocalypse in Late Medieval England: The York Minster Great East Window.” Cross, Crown and Community: Religion, Government and Culture in Early Modern England 1400-1800. Ed. David J. B. Trim and Peter J. Balderstone. Peter Lang, 2004. Pp. 39-75.
• “‘The Lord Geoffrey had me made’: Lordship and Labour in the Luttrell Psalter.” The Problem of Labour in Fourteenth-Century England. Ed. James Bothwell, P. J. P. Goldberg, and W. M. Ormrod. Boydell & Brewer, 2000. Pp. 43-63. With Jeremy Goldberg.
• “Beyond the Apocalypse: The Human Antichrist in Late Medieval Illustrated Manuscripts.” Waiting in Fearful Hope: Approaching a New Millennium. Ed. Christopher Kleinhenz and Fannie LeMoine. University of Wisconsin Press, 1999. Pp. 102-30.
• “‘Englysch Laten’ and ‘Franch’: Demonic Language in Medieval Drama.” The Devil, Heresy, and Witchcraft in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey B. Russell. Ed. Alberto Ferreiro. Brill, 1998. Pp. 305-26.
• “Apocalyptic Themes and Imagery in Medieval and Renaissance Literature.” The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, vol. 2, The Apocalypse in Western History and Culture. Ed. Bernard McGinn. Continuum, 1998. Pp. 402-44.
• “Eliding the ‘Medieval’: New Historicism and Sixteenth-Century Drama.” The Performance of Middle English Culture. Ed. Lawrence Clopper, James Paxson, Sylvia Tomasch. Boydell and Brewer, 1998. Pp. 25-41.
• “Divine Judgment and Local Ideology in the Beauvais Ludus Danielis.” The Play of Daniel: Critical Essays. Ed. Dunbar H. Ogden. Medieval Institute Publications, 1996. Pp. 33-61.
• “Text and Image in the Portraits of the Ellesmere Taletellers.”  The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpretation. Ed. Martin Stevens, Daniel Woodward. Huntington Library Press, 1995. Pp. 143-70.
• “The Apocalypse in Medieval Culture.” The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages.  Ed. Richard K. Emmerson and Bernard McGinn. Cornell University Press, 1993. Pp. 293-332.
• “‘Coveitise to Konne,’ ‘Goddes Privetee,’ and Will's Ambiguous Visionary Experience in Piers Plowman.”  Suche Werkis to Werche: Essays on Piers Plowman in Honor of David C. Fowler.  Ed Míceál Vaughan.  Colleagues Press, 1993. Pp. 89-121.
• “Figura and the Medieval Typological Imagination.” Typology and English Medieval Literature.  Ed. Hugh T. Keenan. Georgia State Literary Studies 7. AMS Press, 1992. Pp. 7-42.
• “Introduction.”  The Biblia Pauperum Codex Palatinus Latinus 871 in the Vatican Library.  Codices e Vaticanis selecti quam simillime expressi iussu Ioannis Pauli PP II consilio et opera curatorum Bibliothecae Vaticanae 51. Belser, 1989.
• “The Canterbury Tales in Eschatological Perspective.” The Use and Abuse of Eschatology in the Middle Ages. Ed. W. Verbeke, D. Verhelst, and A. Welkenhuysen. Mediaevalia Lovaniensia 15. Leuven University Press, 1988. Pp. 404-24. With Ronald Herzman.
• “‘Nowe Ys Common This Daye’: Enoch and Elias, Antichrist, and the Structure of the Chester Cycle.” “Homo, Memento Finis”: The Iconography of Just Judgment in Medieval Art and Drama.  David Bevington, ed. Early Drama, Art and Music, Monograph Series 5; Medieval Institute Publications, 1985. Pp. 89-120. Rpt. in The Chester Mystery Cycle: A Casebook. Ed. Kevin Harty (1993), 171-98.
• “The Prophetic, the Apocalyptic, and the Study of Medieval Literature.” In Poetic Prophecy in Western Literature. Edited by Jan Wojcik and Raymond-Jean Frontain.  Fairleigh-Dickinson University Press, 1984. Pp. 40-54.

Essays in Peer-reviewed Journals

• “Middle English Literature and Illustrated Manuscripts: New Approaches to the Disciplinary and the Interdisciplinary.” JEGP: Journal of English and Germanic Philology 105 (2006): 118-36.
• “Dramatic History: On the Diachronic and Synchronic in the Study of Early English Drama.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35 (2005): 39-66.
• “The Representation of Antichrist in Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias: Image, Word, Commentary, and Visionary Experience.” Gesta 41 (2002): 95-110.
• “Contextualizing Performance: The Reception of the Chester ‘Antichrist.’” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29 (1999): 89-119.
• “Reading Gower in a Manuscript Culture: Latin and English in Illustrated Manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 143-86.
• “Visualizing Performance: The Miniatures of Besançon MS 579 (Jour du Jugement).” Exemplaria 11 (1999): 245-72.
• “The Secret.” American Historical Review 104 (1999): 1603-14.
• “The Morality Character as Sign: A Semiotic Approach to The Castle of Perseverance.” Mediaevalia 18 (1995, for 1992): 191-220.
• “The Apocalypse Cycle in the Bedford Book of Hours.” Traditio 50 (1995): 173-98.
• “‘Or Yernen to Rede Redels?’ Piers Plowman and Prophecy.”  Yearbook of Langland Studies 7 (Fall 1993): 27-76.
• “Wynkyn de Worde's Byrthe and Lyfe of Antechryst and Popular Eschatology on the Eve of the English Reformation.” Mediaevalia 14 (1991, for 1988): 281-311.
• “The Apocalyptic Age of Hypocrisy: Faus Semblant and Amant in the Roman de la Rose.” Speculum 62 (1987): 612-34.  With Ronald Herzman.
• “Apocalypse Now and Then.” Modern Language Quarterly 46 (1985): 351-61.
• “Census and Bibliography of Medieval Manuscripts Containing Apocalypse Illustrations, 800-1500.” Traditio 40 (1984): 337-79; 41 (1985): 367-409; 42 (1986): 443-72. With Suzanne Lewis.
• “From Epistola to Sermo: The Old English Version of Adso's Libellus de Antichristo,” JGEP: Journal of English and Germanic Philology 82 (1983): 1-10.
• “Antichrist, Simon Magus, and Dante's Inferno XIX.”  Traditio 36 (1980): 373-98.  With Ronald Herzman.
• “Antichrist as Anti-Saint: The Significance of Abbot Adso's Libellus de Antichristo.” American Benedictine Review 30 (1979): 175-90.