John Colley

Thesis Title: Translating Greek: Humanism and English Literature, 1430-1560

Supervisor: Prof. Daniel Wakelin

My project investigates humanism, English literature, and the translation of classical and patristic Greek from 1430 to 1560. I look at texts that are translated both directly and indirectly (usually via Latin) from Greek into English, as well as English texts that disingenuously purport to have been translated from Greek sources. Writers of interest include Lydgate, Metham, Skelton, More, Elyot, Udall, Ascham, and Mary Clarke Basset. More broadly, I’m interested in classical reception and book history in fourteenth-, fifteenth-, and sixteenth-century England. I also have particular interest in the works of the early Tudor translator Alexander Barclay.

Peer-reviewed publications

-- '"Et melles en semble": Literariness and a Trilingual Recipe Collection from Late Medieval England', in Recipes and Book Culture in England, 1350–1600, ed. Carrie Griffin and Hannah Ryley (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, forthcoming)

-- ‘Chaucer’s “Ebrayk Josephus” and The House of Fame’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 43 (2021), forthcoming

-- ‘Branding Barclay: The Printed Glosses and Envoys to Alexander Barclay’s Shyp of Folys (1509)’, Philological Quarterly 99 (2020), 147–70

Review articles

-- 'Roman Greatness', The Cambridge Quarterly, forthcoming [a review of John-Mark Philo, 'An Ocean Untouched and Untried': The Tudor Translations of Livy (Oxford, 2020) and Nigel Mortimer, Medieval and Early Modern Portrayals of Julius Caesar: The Transmission of an Idea (Oxford, 2020)]

-- ‘Quoting the Bard’, The Cambridge Quarterly 49 (2020), 96–101 [a review of Regula Hohl Trillini, Casual Shakespeare: Three Centuries of Verbal Echoes (London, 2018)]