Staff profile

Current Teaching

Level 2 Module: 'Heretics and Inquisitors in the Late Middle Ages'

Level 3 Single Module: 'The Divine and the Diabolical: Apocalypticism, Mysticism, and the Discernment of Spirits in Late Medieval Europe'

PhD: University of St Andrews, 2014

2016-2017: Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, Canada

2018-2022: Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Department of History, University of Nottingham

I am a historian of late medieval religious culture, specialising in heresy and inquisition with a particular focus on the condemnation of heretical texts. My book, A Diabolical Voice: Heresy and the Reception of the Latin Mirror of Simple Souls in the Late Middle Ages (forthcoming May 2023), presents a new reception history for the condemned mystical work The Mirror of Simple Souls. The Mirror was condemned as heretical in Paris in 1310 and its author, Marguerite Porete, was burned at the stake. My book demonstrates a continued trend of opposition directed at the Mirror long after this condemnation, centered specifically around its Latin translation, and which occurred simultaneously with an increasingly positive reception in other circles. Theologians, canon lawyers, inquisitors, and preachers continued to attack the Mirror as dangerously heretical, and entirely in ignorance of its initial condemnation.

My current research focuses on the condemnation of heretical texts in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries more broadly. I examine issues of procedure, knowledge, and memory of a condemnation and the impact these had on the circulation and suppression of condemned books. I am also interested in medieval perceptions of heretical books, and examine how the perception of books in relation to heresy developed and shifted over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and what this means for how we conceive of late medieval heresy as a whole.

Authored book

• Trombley, J. L. A Diabolical Voice: Heresy and the Reception of the Latin Mirror of Simple Souls in Late Medieval Europe. Cornell University Press

Chapter in book

• Trombley, J. (2018). New Frontiers in the Late Medieval Reception of a Heretical Text: The Implications of Two New Latin Copies of Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls. In Late Medieval Heresy: New Perspectives. Studies in Honor of Robert E. Lerner (157-177). Boydell & Brewer
• Trombley, J. (2017). The Latin Manuscripts of The Mirror of Simple Souls. In A Companion to Marguerite Porete and The Mirror of Simple Souls (186-217). https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004338562_009

Journal Article

• Trombley, J. (2019). Self-Defence and Its Limits in Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls. Nottingham Medieval Studies, 63, 129-151. https://doi.org/10.1484/j.nms.5.118197
• Trombley, J. L. (2018). The Text as Heretic: Mixed Genres and Polemical Techniques in a Refutation of the Mirror of Simple Souls. medieval worlds, Medieval Worlds(Volume 7. 2018), 137-152. https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no7_2018s137
• Trombley, J. L. (2017). New evidence on the origins of the Latin Mirror of Simple Souls from a forgotten Paduan manuscript. Journal of Medieval History, 43(2), https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2017.1284690
• Trombley, J. L. (2010). The Master and the Mirror: The Influence of Marguerite Porete on Meister Eckhart