Early Modern

Faculty members researching in this area:

Permanent Postholders: Professor Sharon Achinstein, Dr Margaret Kean, Dr Paulina Kewes, Dr Rhodri Lewis, Professor Laurie Maguire, Professor Richard McCabe, Professor Peter McCullough, Dr Helen Moore, Dr Kathryn Murphy, Professor David Norbrook, Professor Simon Palfrey, Dr John Pitcher, Dr William Poole, Dr Diane Purkiss, Dr Emma Smith, Professor Tiffany Stern, Dr Bart van Es, and Dr Philip West.

Research and college staff: Dr Anna Beer, Dr Kate Bennett, Dr Giles Bergel, Mr Boyd Brogan, Dr Mark Burden, Dr Colin Burrow, Dr Ben Burton, Dr Alexandra Da Costa, Dr Tania Demetriou, Dr Madeleine Forey, Dr Hugh Gazzard, Dr Beatrice Groves, Mr Nick Hardy, Professor Anne Hudson, Dr Richard Lawes, Dr Tom MacFaul, Dr Julie Maxwell, Dr James McBain, Dr Ben Morgan, Dr Kendra Packham, Dr Lynn Robson, Mr Chris Salamone, Dr Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Dr Olivia Smith, Mr Tim Smith-Laing, Dr Chris Stamatakis, Dr Sebastiaan Verweij, and Mr Kelsey Williams.

Our research:

A copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio in the Bodleian Library is said to fall open especially easily at the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, indicating its first readers’ favourite scene. You can still consult this copy in the seventeenth-century reading room where it was first shelved. Studying early modern literature at Oxford has the extra excitement of so many living links with the past. Donne and Middleton studied here. You can read the huge collection of play-books presented to the Bodleian by Robert Burton, and the manuscript poem John Milton addressed to the librarian.

The study of Renaissance English literature at Oxford in modern times has a distinguished tradition including Percy and Evelyn Simpson, the latter the first woman to be awarded a doctorate at Oxford, Dame Helen Gardner, D. F. McKenzie, A. D. Nuttall, John Carey, and Katherine Duncan-Jones. Today’s Oxford English Faculty has the largest grouping of specialists in this period in the world. There are many specialists in other Faculties and interdisciplinary links are actively fostered by the Centre for Early Modern Studies, whose website offers fuller information about early modern English at Oxford link. [http://www/cems.ox.ac.uk] Current work on Shakespeare and the drama is exploratory in many different ways. Paulina Kewes has set Shakespeare’s history plays in a much wider context. Laurie Maguire’s innovative study of Shakespeare’s names is followed by a literary life of Helen of Troy from Homer to Hollywood, funded by a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship. Helen Moore has studied the drama in relation to prose fiction and popular plays. Simon Palfrey’s interest in Shakespeare’s language and Tiffany Stern’s in the practical circumstances of dramatic production have been brought together in enterprising collaborative work. One of Diane Purkiss’s projects is a study of the supernatural in Shakespeare. Emma Smith has been developing an eclectic pedagogy, investigating new ways of communicating work on Shakespeare to a wider public. Bart van Es is exploring Shakespeare’s development as a writer in relation to the history of the dramatic companies. Richard McCabe and Bart van Es have made important contributions to Spenser studies. Work on seventeenth century non-dramatic literature ranges from Peter McCullough’s revisionist studies of Donne and his contexts through Rhodri Lewis’s exploration of ideas of language to Philip West’s study of Henry Vaughan in context. Another major area of interest is the literature and politics of the Civil War period in its origins and aftermath, and the Faculty has the largest group of specialists on Milton in the world. Sharon Achinstein has studied Milton’s relations to the period’s radical reading cultures, Margaret Kean has traced the ancestry of Milton’s Hell, David Norbrook works on the republicanism of Milton and Lucy Hutchinson, and Diane Purkiss has analyzed the gender implications of the Civil War’s political and military conflicts.

Editing and the history of the book have always been particular concerns of Oxford English, and Faculty members are actively involved in new editions of Bacon (Lewis), Daniel (Pitcher), Donne's sermons (McCullough), Jonson (Burrow), Shirley (West), Milton (Achinstein), Lucy Hutchinson (Norbrook).

There is a lively graduate culture in the early modern period. In addition to the regular Early Modern Literature seminar, many seminars are organized by graduates with support from the Faculty. The Centre for Early Modern Studies holds an annual interdisciplinary workshop for scholars and graduate students, presenting research and building up new connections across a range of disciplines from English to Oriental Studies.

Recent publications:

Sharon Achinstein, Milton and Toleration, co-ed. Elizabeth Sauer (2007), winner of the Irene Samuel Award from the Milton Society of America.

Margaret Kean, Inferno: a Cultural History of Hell (2009).

Paulina Kewes, Drama, History, and Politics in Elizabethan England (2009).

Rhodri Lewis, Language, Mind and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke (2007).

Laurie Maguire, Shakespeare’s Names (2007).

Richard McCabe, Spenser's Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference (2002).

Peter McCullough, ed., Lancelot Andrewes: Selected Sermons and Lectures (2005).

Helen Moore, ed., Guy of Warwick (2009).

David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627-1660 (1999).

Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare in Parts (2007).

Tom Paulin, Crusoe’s Secret: The Aesthetics of Dissent (2005).

John Pitcher, ed., Cymbeline (2005).

Diane Purkiss, Literature, Gender, and Politics during the English Civil War (2005).

Emma Smith, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare (2007)

Bart van Es, Spenser's Forms of History (2002).

Philip West, Henry Vaughan's ‘Silex Scintillans’: Scripture Uses (2001).

Other information:

Centre for Early Modern Studies