Dr John Colley
Thesis Title: Humanism, English Literature, and the Translation of Greek, c.1480–1560
My DPhil project investigated humanism, English literature, and the translation of classical and patristic Greek in early Tudor England, and presented a history of classical reception which was rarely straightforwardly 'classical'. In it, I looked 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 included John Skelton, Thomas More, Thomas Elyot, Nicholas Udall, Roger Ascham, and Mary Clarke Basset.
I'm currently pursuing two new projects as a Research Fellow at St John's College, Cambridge (jwsc5@cam.ac.uk). The first project is an edition of an anonymous early Tudor translation into English of Sallust's Bellum Catilinae. The second is a new monograph project, provisionally titled 'Comedy and the Classical Tradition: Drama in England from Frulovisi to Shakespeare'.
Peer-reviewed journal articles
– ‘Diodorus Siculus in the English Quattrocento: New Light on the Source of Skelton’s Bibliotheca historica’, Medium Ævum 92 or 93 (forthcoming 2023 or 2024)
– 'Xenophon in English: The Sources of William Barker's Education of Cyrus', Notes and Queries (forthcoming), advance article available at https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjad062
– 'Thomas Elyot and the Translation of Galen', Review of English Studies 74 (2023), 619–34 [open access]
– ‘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
Peer-reviewed book chapter
– ‘“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)
Reviews
– review of Chris Preddle, Sappho: Songs and Poems, Translated from the Greek (Belfast, 2022) and Diane J. Rayor and André Lardinois, Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works (Cambridge, 2023), in Translation and Literature 32 (2023), 225–32
– 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)]
