Allen J. Frantzen

Allen J. Frantzen (born 1947) and a PhD from the University of Virginia with a dissertation on the literature of penance in the Anglo-Saxon period. He was a faculty member at Loyola University Chicago from 1978 until his retirement in 2014, when he was named an emeritus professor. While there he headed the graduate programs in English from 1984 to 1988 and in 1992 founded the Loyola Community Literacy Center, which is open to the community as well as to students at the university.

Publications Frantzen has published introductory works intended for students, such as King Alfred (1986) and Troilus and Criseyde': The Poem and the Frame (1993) on Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. He also co-edited The Work of Work. Servitude, Slavery, and Labor in Medieval England (1994) with Douglas Moffat.

His first book was on the subject-matter of his dissertation, The Literature of Penance in Anglo-Saxon England (1983); he returned to the Anglo-Saxon penitential literature in Before the Closet: Same-Sex Love from 'Beowulf' to 'Angels in America (1998), in which, himself a gay man, The book has been described as "groundbreaking". The former, in which Frantzen argues that Anglo-Saxon studies are increasingly regarded as hidebound because of the insular approach within the field, attracted much notice. Fred C. Robinson wrote that it "should be read by all medievalists who care about their profession." In 1994 Frantzen was the keynote speaker at a conference at the University of California, Berkeley that was published as Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (1997).

In Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War (2004) he studied the mythology of chivalry and of imitatio Christi as motivations for participants in World War I.

After his retirement, Frantzen wrote a blog post dated September 2015 titled "How to Fight Your Way Out of the Feminist Fog" in which he aligned himself with the men's rights movement against what he argued were the anti-man demands of feminists; this provoked disapproving responses from certain medievalists after it was publicized in early 2016.

Honors Guggenheim Fellowship, 1993 Loyola University Faculty Member of the Year 1991, Master Teacher (College of Arts & Sciences) 1997–98, Faculty Scholar 2000. Opera Omnia: A Festspiel for Allen J. Frantzen: celebratory conference organized by former students, 2015.