Bernardo S. Hinojosa

Bernardo S. Hinojosa specializes in premodern literature from classical antiquity to the early seventeenth century, with a particular focus on medieval poetry, prose, and drama (c.1150-1500) and their relationship to the intellectual developments of the period. His research and teaching interests also include science and technology studies, ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, the history of information from ancient scrolls to digital interfaces, and contemporary film and media.

His first book, Before the Eyes: Medieval Literature and the Art of Experiment, traces the development of experimentalist thinking in the Middle Ages and argues for its foundational role in literary history. After the twelfth century, as Aristotelian ideas and texts gained currency in the Latin West, medieval natural philosophers developed writing and imaginative techniques that could enable the mental rehearsal and investigation of the material world and its imperceptible processes. Vernacular writers of the succeeding generation adopted and expanded these techniques in their own works, bringing natural phenomena and the world’s changeability “before the eyes” of their audiences.

Recent publications include essays on the relationship between scribal technique and literary aesthetics in fifteenth-century devotional manuscripts (New Medieval Literatures, 2023), on theatrical representations of the Eucharist (Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2024), and on medieval pedagogies on “the craft of writing” (New Literary History, forthcoming).