John Colley

Thesis Title: Humanism, English Literature, and the Translation of Greek, 1480–1560

Supervisor: Prof. Daniel Wakelin

My project investigates humanism, English literature, and the translation of classical and patristic Greek in early Tudor England, and presents a history of classical reception which is rarely straightforwardly 'classical'. In it, I look at texts that are translated both directly and indirectly (often via Latin) from Greek into English, as well as English works that are disingenuously and falsely presented as translations from Greek sources. Writers of interest include John Skelton, Thomas More, Thomas Elyot, Nicholas Udall, Roger Ascham, and Mary Clarke Basset. More broadly, I’m interested in classical reception, translation, and book history in England c.1350–1600. 

Peer-reviewed publications

– ‘New Light on the Source of Skelton’s Bibliotheca historica’, Medium Ævum 92 or 93 (forthcoming 2023 or 2024)

– ‘“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, forthcoming 2023)

– ‘Henrician Homer: English Verse Translations from the Iliad and Odyssey, 1531–1545’, Translation and Literature 31 (2022), 149–78

– ‘Chaucer’s “Ebrayk Josephus” and The House of Fame’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 43 (2021), 45–74

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

Review articles

– review of Stephanie Burt, After Callimachus: Poems (Princeton, 2020), in Translation and Literature 31 (2022), 374–80

– ‘Roman Greatness’, Cambridge Quarterly 50 (2021), 401–7 [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’, Cambridge Quarterly 49 (2020), 96–101 [a review of Regula Hohl Trillini, Casual Shakespeare: Three Centuries of Verbal Echoes (London, 2018)]