Dr Alexis Statz

Research Interests:

Alexis’s work is broadly interdisciplinary. Her doctoral thesis, completed at the University of Cambridge in 2024, is entitled ‘The Pastoral Image: Guillaume de Deguileville’s Spiritual Pedagogy in the Pèlerinage Allegories’. The thesis analyses the Cistercian monk and poet Guillaume de Deguileville’s three dream-visions: the Pèlerinage de vie humaine (1330 and 1355), the Pèlerinage de l’âme (1355), and the Pèlerinage 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  that focuses on the thirteenth-century diagrammatic encyclopaedia L’Image du monde by Gautier de Metz.

Publications:

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)