Norbrook, Professor David

Job Title: Merton Professor of English Literature
College: Merton
Period/ Subject: Early Modern

Email address: david.norbrook@ell.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests:

After completing a study of republican writing in the English Revolution, I have turned to a detailed study of a woman republican, Lucy Hutchinson (1620-81), who was both a fascinating chronicler of the civil war period but a representative of the ways in which the ideological struggles of that period continued far into the Restoration period. I am general editor of a four-volume edition of her works. This is an exciting but difficult project, since little is known of her life and some of her writings have been discovered in the course of my research and have received no previous commentary. It is also a necessarily interdisciplinary and collaborative project since her interests ranged from Latin poetry to Calvinist theology and the nitty-gritty of Civil War politics in Nottinghamshire. I have finished a long period of work on the reception of Lucretius in connection with a new edition of her translation, co-edited with Professor Reid Barbour. I am now moving on to the next two volumes including her theological writings of the 1670s, in collaboration with Dr Elizabeth Clarke and Professor Jane Stevenson, and her Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, with Professor Martyn Bennett. I am also interested in the Restoration careers of other civil war writers like Marvell and George Wither.

As Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies (www.cems.ox.ac.uk) I have been trying to build up interdisciplinary exchanges in the Oxford Humanities Division in workshops and in regular seminars, such fields as neo-Latin writing, the history of scholarship, and digital research in the early modern period. I am keen to see ways in which Oxford’s extraordinary range of museums and archives could be deployed on the light of current work on the material history of books, manuscripts and artefacts.

Teaching Areas:

I lecture on sixteenth- and seventeenth- century literature, Marvell, Milton, and women’s writing amongst other topics and have given M.St. classes on ‘Early Modern Women and the Book’ and ‘Rewriting Lucretius: Materialism and Poetry in the Seventeenth Century’. I have supervised doctoral dissertations on Shakespeare, political poetry and prose ranging from the mid-Tudor period to the Restoration, and Hugh MacDiarmid.

Recent Publications:

Books

The Works of Lucy Hutchinson, vol. 1: The Translation of Lucretius, ed. Reid Barbour and David Norbrook, with Latin text by Maria Cristina Zerbino (Oxford University Press, 2012). ISBN: 978-0-19-924736-3.

Lucy Hutchinson's ‘Order and Disorder' (ed.), (Blackwell Publishers, 2001). ISBN: 0631220607 (hardcover), 0631220615 (paperback).
Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627-1660 (Cambridge University Press, 1999). ISBN: 0521632757 (hardcover), 0521785693 (paperback).
The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse (with Henry Woudhuysen) (Allen Lane, 1992). ISBN: 014042346X; reprinted with minor revisions, Penguin Books, 2005.
Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984; revised edition, Oxford University Press, 2002). ISBN: 0199247188 (hardcover), 0199247196 (paperback).

Articles

'Afterword', in The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women, 1558-1680, ed. Johanna Harris and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (Houndmills, 2011), pp. 202-13.

'Milton, Lucy Hutchinson, and the Lucretian Sublime', Tate Papers, Issue 13 (Spring 2010): online at http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/

‘Bards and Republicans: Marvell's “Horatian Ode” and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms', in Anne Lake Prescott and James Dutcher (eds.), Renaissance Historicisms: Essays in Honor of Arthur F. Kinney (University of Delaware Press, 2008), pp. 291-312.
‘A Response to Peter Rudnytsky’, in Vera J. Camden (ed.), Trauma and Transformation: The Political Progress of John Bunyan (Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 36-40.
`‘Marvell's Scaevola Scoto-Brittannus and the Ethics of Political Violence', in Marshall Grossman (ed.), Reading Renaissance Ethics (Routledge, 2007; ISBN 780415406345 ), pp. 173-89.

‘“But a Copie”: Textual Authority and Gender in Editions of “The Life of John Hutchinson”’, in W. Speed Hill (ed.), New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, III: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1997-2001 (Tempe, Ariz., 2004; ISBN 0866983139), pp. 109-30; reprinted in Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700: Volume 5, ed. Mihoko Suzuki (Ashgate, 2009).
‘Women, the Republic of Letters , and the Public Sphere in the Mid-Seventeenth Century', Criticism , 46 (2004), 223-40. ISSN 0111-1589.
‘Lucy Hutchinson' and ‘Thomas May', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , 2004.
‘John Milton, Lucy Hutchinson and the Republican Biblical Epic', in Milton and the Grounds of Contention , ed. Mark R. Kelley, Michael Lieb and John Shawcross (Duquesne University Press, 2003; ISBN 0-8207-0345-1), pp. 37-63. Awarded Hanford Prize of the Milton Society of America , 2004.
‘ “Words more than Civil”: Republican Civility in Lucy Hutchinson's “The Life of John Hutchinson”', in Jennifer Richards (ed.), Early Modern Civil Discourses (Ashgate, 2003; ISBN 1-4039-1736-1), pp. 68-84.
‘Autonomy and the Republic of Letters : Michèle Le Dœuff, Anna Maria van Schurman, and the History of Women Intellectuals', Australian Journal of French Studies (ISSN 0004-9468), 40:3 (2003), 275-87.
‘Republican Occasions in Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes ', Milton Studies , 42 (2002), 122-48 (ISSN 0076-8820).
‘The English Revolution and Historiography', in N. H. Keeble (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution ( Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 233-50.
‘Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson: Identity, Ideology and Politics', In-Between , 9 (2000), 179-203.

‘Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson ', in David Womersley (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Literature from Milton to Blake (Blackwell, 2000), pp. 82-8.

‘Lucy Hutchinson and Order and Disorder : The Manuscript Evidence', English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700 , 9 (2000), 257-91.

‘“A devine Originall”: Lucy Hutchinson and the “woman’s version”’, Times Literary Supplement, 19 March 1999, pp. 13-15.

‘A Republican Verse Manifesto, 1653: John Ward's “The Changes”', The Seventeenth Century , 13 (1998), 185-211.

‘Lucy Hutchinson's “Elegies” and the Situation of the Republican Woman Writer', English Literary Renaissance , 27 (1997), 468-521; reprinted in Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700: Volume 5, ed. Mihoko Suzuki (Ashgate, 2009).
‘An Imaginary Conversation between Walter Savage Landor and Walter Savage Landor', in Barney Cokeliss and James Fenton (eds.), Jellyfish Cupful: Writings in Honour of John Fuller (Ulysses, 1997), pp. 85-89.
‘An Unpublished Poem by Sidney Godolphin', Review of English Studies , 48 (1997), 498-500.
‘“A Liberal Tongue”: Language and Rebellion in Richard II' , in John M. Mucciolo (ed.), Shakespeare's Universe (Scolar Press, 1996), 37-51; reprinted in Kirby Farrell (ed.), Critical Essays on Shakespeare's ‘Richard II' (New York: G. K. Hunter & Co., 1999), pp. 121-34.
‘The Emperor's New Body?: Richard II, Ernst Kantorowicz, and the Politics of Shakespeare Criticism', Textual Practice , 10:2 (1996), 329-57.
‘Some Notes on the Canon of George Wither', Notes and Queries , 241 (1996), 276-82.
‘Lucy Hutchinson versus Edmund Waller: An Unpublished Reply to Waller's A Panegyrick to my Lord Protector ', The Seventeenth Century , 11 (1996), 61-86.
‘“Safest in Storms”: George Wither in the 1650s', in David Margolies and Maroula Joannou (eds.), Heart of the Heartless World: Essays in Cultural Resistance in Memory of Margot Heinemann (Pluto Press, 1995), pp. 19-32.
‘Euripides, Milton, and Christian Doctrine ', Milton Quarterly , 29 (1995), 37-41.
‘Lucan, Thomas May, and the Creation of a Republican Literary Culture', in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds.), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Macmillan, 1994), pp. 45-66.
‘Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Elizabethan World Picture', in Peter Mack (ed.), Renaissance Rhetoric (Macmillan, 1994), pp. 140-64.
‘Milton 's Areopagitica, Censorship, and the Early Modern Public Sphere', in Richard Burt (ed.), The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism and the Public Sphere (University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 3-33; reprinted in Robert DeMaria (ed.), British Literature 1640-1789: A Critical Reader (Blackwell, 1998), pp. 13-39.
‘“This Blushing Tribute of a Borrowed Muse”: Robert Overton's Overturning of the Seventeenth-Century Poetic Canon', English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700 , 4 (1993), 220-66.
‘“What Cares These Roarers for the Name of King?”: Language and Utopia in The Tempest', in Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope (eds.), Renaissance Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After (Routledge, 1992), pp. 20-54; reprinted in R. S. White (ed.), The Tempest , New Casebooks (Macmillan, 1999), pp. 167-90; Kiernan Ryan (ed.), Shakespeare's Last Plays (Longman, 1999), pp. 245-78; in Richard Branson Brown and David Johnson (eds.), A Shakespeare Reader: Sources and Criticism , (Macmillan/St Martin's Press, 2000), pp. 270-80; and in William Shakespeare: The Tempest, ed. Sarbani Chaudhury (Pearson Longman, 2009), pp. 159-97.
‘Levelling Poetry: George Wither and the English Revolution, 1642-1649', English Literary Renaissance , 21 (1991), 217-56; reprinted in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, vol. 96 (Gale Group), 2004.
‘Marvell's “Horatian Ode” and the Politics of Genre', in Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday (eds.), Literature and the English Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 147-69, reprinted in Cristina Malcolmson (ed.), Renaissance Poetry (Longman, 1998), pp. 249-71, and in Thomas Healy (ed.), Andrew Marvell (Longman, 1998), pp. 100-29.
‘The Monarchy of Wit and the Republic of Letters : Donne's Politics', in Katharine Maus and Elizabeth Harvey (eds.), Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 3-36.
‘Life and Death of Renaissance Man', Raritan , 8:4 (Spring 1989), 89-110.
‘ Macbeth and the Politics of Historiography', in Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker (eds.),Politics of Discourse (University of California Press, 1987), pp. 78-116; reprinted in Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen (eds.), Shakespeare and History (New York and London: Garland, 1999), pp. 230-77.
‘ The Masque of Truth : Court Entertainments and International Protestant Politics in the Early Stuart Period', The Seventeenth Century , 1 (1986), 81-110.
‘The Reformation of the Masque', in David Lindley (ed.), The Court Masque (Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 94-110.

Other Information:

Awards and Visiting Appointments

2009 Honored Scholar of the Milton Society of America.

Visiting Professor, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, April 2009.

2004 Hanford Prize of the Milton Society of America for most distinguished essay on Milton published in the year.

2000 Hanford Prize of the Milton Society of America for most distinguished book on Milton published in the year.

1999: Elected Emeritus Fellow of Magdalen College , Oxford .

1996-98: British Academy Research Readership.

Fall 1994: seminar series on `The Literary Culture of English Republicanism' at the Newberry Library, Chicago, funded by National Endowment for the Humanities

Summer 1990: lecture tour of Australia supported by the British Council.

Spring 1989: Visiting Professor, Graduate Center , City University of New York.

Autumn 1985: English-Speaking Union Fellow, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C.

College Website

Back to Faculty Members