Dr Leah Veronese

My research interests are based in early modern religion, epistolary culture, manuscript studies, and the work of John Donne. I am currently preparing a monograph (based on my AHRC funded DPhil thesis) Suing for Grace: the Early Modern Rhetoric of Petition. Suing for Grace focuses on an ubiquitous early modern source: the petition, the ancestor of modern mass-subscribed petitions found on change.org and petition.parliament.uk. In the early modern period, petitions could be prayers addressed to God or letters addressed to a secular power. Suing for Grace argues that comparing and contrasting petitioning social superiors and petitioning God opened up a space for political criticism. The book includes chapters on the work of Edmund Spenser and John Donne, as well as highlighting unstudied archival material, including historical petitioners and a subgenre of verse-libel which I describe as the ‘mock petition’. I am now developing a second monograph project on John Donne’s architectural metaphor.

My research beyond my DPhil has been characterised by archival research and highlighting understudied archival voices. I have collaborated with Dr Daniel Starza Smith on the first literary study of the epistolary writer Elizabeth Bourne (1549–1599), producing essays for The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women’s Writing in English 1540-1700 and The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing. Recently, I have worked on a manuscript copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, offering new evidence about the reception, and political repurposing, of Shakespeare during the Civil War.  My article on the sonnet was selected as the runner-up for the Review of English Studies annual essay prize for early career scholars.