John Colley

Thesis Title: The Translation of Greek and Early Tudor Humanism

Supervisor: Prof. Daniel Wakelin

My project investigates humanism, English literature, and the translation of classical and patristic Greek in early Tudor England. I look at texts which are translated both directly and indirectly (often via Latin) from Greek into English, as well as English works which are disingenuously 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 and book history in England from the late fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. I've taught early and late medieval literature (650–1550) for Prelims and Finals at several colleges in Oxford.

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 2023)

-- 'Henrician Homer: English Verse Translations from the Iliad and Odyssey, 1531–1545', Translation & Literature 31 (2022), forthcoming

-- ‘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

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