Jake Arthur

Thesis Title: “The stuffe not ours”: the work of derivation in women’s writing, 1560–c.1664

Supervisor: Professor Lorna Hutson

Research Interests: Early modern women’s writing, translation, paraphrase, humanism, and religious poetry.

Doctoral Research: My research examines early modern women’s involvement in 'derivative' modes of writing, specifically translation and paraphrase. These 'derivative' works make up a significant proportion of women's extant literary corpus and represent diverse engagements with contemporary literary, intellectual and political culture. However, they have occupied a vexed position in criticism, as they are neither straightforwardly indexical of women’s lives nor an original literary production of the type that the canon has typically valued. My study advocates a close and comparative methodology that views derivative texts against their sources to recover the individual choices women paraphrasts and translators took. This is a methodology that is currently underutilised but which offers us a powerful impression of the diversity of early modern women's interventions as well as a salutary reminder of the power and flexibility of derivative writing itself.

I also have research interests in complaint and petitionary writing, especially by women, and the use of gardens in conceptualising nationhood in early modern Britain.