David Lyle Jeffrey (born June 28, 1941) is a Canadian-American scholar of literature and religion, currently a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Baylor Institute for Studies in Religion. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (1996-). In 2003 he was given the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Conference of Christianity and Literature.
Education and Career
1965, Jeffrey received his B.A. in English from Wheaton College. In 1968, he received his Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Princeton University under D.W. Robertson, Jr and John V. Fleming. Much of his life has been spent in the rural Ottawa Valley, where he farmed actively for many years simultaneously with his academic vocation. Jeffrey has held professorships at the University of Victoria (1968-1969 and 1973-1978), University of Rochester (1969-1973), University of Ottawa (1978-1996), Augustine College (1997-2000), and Baylor University (2000-), with visiting and guest professorships from Regent College (1970, 1973, and 1976), the University of Notre Dame (1995 and 2002), Peking University (1996–present), as well as the Reckitt Visiting Professorship at the University of Hull (1971-1972). He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Ottawa (since 1996), and Honorary Professor at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing (2005–present). He was Senior Vice Provost at Baylor University from 2001 to 2003 and Provost from 2003 to 2005, and has been Distinguished Professor of Literature and the Humanities at Baylor from 2000 to his retirement in 2019, teaching mostly in the Honors College and Philosophy Department. He continues as a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Baylor Institute for Studies in Religion.
Jeffrey is a generalist in the Humanities, most known for his work on the Bible in English literature, his Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature (1992) having become a standard reference work. He has also worked in biblical translation theory, the history of interpretation, theology and the arts, philosophy of art, and Chinese philosophy and literature. His scholarship is characteristically interdisciplinary and multilingual, yet it can be said to be broadly divisible into three parts.
As a medievalist, especially during the first third of his career, Jeffrey has been associated with the interpretative tradition of D. W. Robertson Jr., an approach which emphasizes medieval European authors’ knowledge of classical and Christian texts as of great importance for understanding their appeal to their original audiences. This contrasts with the opinion advocated by C. S. Lewis and popular in the mid to late twentieth century, namely that a romantic and Celtic mythological substratum is more fundamental. Jeffrey's general method has been to compare the first interpretative horizon of a medieval text with subsequent readings over the centuries, considering reception history not only for the sake of illuminating the text in question more fully, but also for the light cast on cultural change itself.
In this regard, he has given considerable attention to the influence of biblical literature and its Jewish and Christian traditions of commentary. According to Jeffrey, a chief impediment to sound understanding of English literature of any period, including the present, has been the lack of biblical literacy so evident in modernity generally. Since the 1980s, Jeffrey has attempted to remind secular critics of the formative presence of biblical narrative and symbol in the growth of the English poetic imagination. This was a major theme of his Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature (1992), his People of the Book (1996), and is still evident in his most recent Scripture and the English Literary Imagination (2019). In each of these volumes, Jeffrey tracks the intellectual history of English literary works from the earliest vernacular texts to the works of contemporary poets and novelists. This diachronic historical-philological method is likewise employed in his art criticism. He has edited and translated medieval texts—Latin, French, Italian and Old and Middle English, and published commentary on both Old and New Testaments.