Leah Veronese
Email: leah.veronese-clucas@ell.ox.ac.uk
Research:
My AHRC-funded DPhil Suing for Grace: the Early Modern Rhetoric of Petition focused on the petition - an early modern letter of request and prayer of request. This dual meaning did not escape early modern writers, who frequently exploited it for rhetorical effect. The thesis explored how early modern writers elaborated on petitionary metaphor, and to what ends; it considered the transfer between the formal characteristics of petition and literary forms which drew upon these conventions. Its four chapters focused on: real petitionary rhetoric in action in two petitions by John Appleyard to the Privy Council in 1567; how Edmund Spenser exploits the connection between political, martial, religious, and romantic petition in the Amoretti, and the colonial significance of these connections; how Donne uses religious metaphor to negotiate hierarchy and petition for access in his verse-letters, compared with his petitions to God in the Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions; and the circulation of the Jacobean verse-libel ‘The Commons Petition to St Eliza’ among other mock-petitions.
I have also published with Dr Daniel Starza Smith on the early modern epistolary writer Elizabeth Bourne. Her surviving correspondence include skilful petitions with which she successfully negotiated a separation from her husband, and literary love-letters in which she and her lover John Conway created a collaborative safe-haven for their affair by exchanging dream visions. Her letters were nearly burnt in the eighteenth-century, when the Conway Papers were sent to the British Museum, deemed 'of no importance'; the survival of Bourne’s letters, and the difficulty of working with them consequently raise methodological and ethical questions about our interactions with the archive. Our work on Bourne is published in the Oxford Handbook to Early Modern Women’s Writing in English 1540-1700 and the Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing.
I am currently developing a new research project on John Donne’s use of architectural metaphor.
Teaching: I have taught Paper 1, Paper 3 and Paper 4 at Lincoln College and Balliol College. My teaching draws on close-reading, material culture, queer studies, and critical race studies.
