Exeter Early Modernists

A brief introduction to members of the Exeter Centre for Early Modern Studies

Dr. Pascale Aebischer (English) works on Shakespeare, feminist performance studies and Jacobean drama. Her current projects revolve around the present-day performances, on stages and screens, of plays by Marlowe, Webster, Middleton, Jonson and Ford. Previous publications include Jacobean Drama: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance (CUP, 2004).

Dr. Sara Barker (History) undertook her doctoral research at the University of St Andrews, looking at the development of French Protestant identity through the writings of the reformer Antoine de Chandieu, which forms the basis of her recent monograph, Protestantism, Poetry and Protest: The Vernacular Writings of Antoine de Chandieu (c. 1534–1591) (Ashgate, 2009). She is interested in all aspects of early modern print culture, especially translation, editing and anthologising. She is currently editing a collection of essays inspired by the work of the late Robert M. Kingdon, to be published in the series St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture, and a collection of essays on Renaissance Translation, with Professor Brenda M. Hosington, to be published by Brill.

Dr Jonathan Barry (History) has used south-western England, and in particular Bristol, in the period 1600-1800, to explore many aspects of early modern society, including the history of towns, the middling sort, provincial culture and the press, religious and political pluralism in post-Revolutionary England, and the histories of science, medicine and witchcraft. He has edited nine books and his forthcoming publications, both in 2011, are his book Witchcraft and Demonology in South-West England 1640-1790 (in Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and magic, which he co-edits) and his edition of The Diary of William Dyer for 1762 (Bristol Record Society, of which he is a co-editor). He is now working on a book on education in early modern Bristol.

Professor Karen Edwards (English) is currently working on the culture of vituperative insult in Civil War polemics, a project developing from her first book, Milton and the Natural World: Science and Poetry in ‘Paradise Lost’ (CUP, 1999), and her ongoing work on the presence of political, satiric, and ‘scientific’ animals in the works of Milton and other early modern writers.

Professor Henry French (History) is the author of studies including The Middle Sort of People in Provincial England, 1620-1750 (OUP, 2007) and, with RW Hoyle, The Character of English Rural Society, 1550-1750: Earls Colne Revisited (Manchester UP, 2007). His recent research interest has focused on long-term processes of change in notions of masculinity among the landed elite in England, between the later seventeenth and early twentieth centuries; he has been awarded an AHRC standard research grant to pursue this research, which will result in a monograph authored with Dr. Mark Rothery (Exeter), entitled Man’s Estate: Landed Gentry Masculinities, 1660-1914 (OUP, 2011).

Professor Marion Gibson  (English) has written extensively on texts connected by an interest in the supernatural, magic and witchcraft in literature, especially popular literature. Her most recent books are Possession, Puritanism and Print (on the sensational exorcisms of the puritan activist John Darrell 1586-97) and Witchcraft Myths in American Culture (on America’s obsession with witches 1620-present). In 2008, she and Dr. Garry Tregidga (Institute of Cornish Studies, Department of History) received a quarter-of-a-million pound AHRC grant for a project focusing on ‘Mysticism, Myth and ‘Celtic’ Nationalism’. Marion’s major contribution will be a book on representations of the British pagan past. In addition there will be a book of proceedings of this summer’s ‘Mysticism, Myth, Nationalism’ conference.

Dr. Johanna Harris (English) is working on two book projects, Puritan Epistolary Community in Early Modern England: The Letters of the Harley Network (for Palgrave Macmillan), and an edition of the non-epistolary manuscript writings of the puritan Lady Brilliana Harley (for Ashgate’s Early Modern Englishwoman series). She is interested in the literary, religious and intellectual culture of early modern England, particularly English puritanism, literary cultures of dissent, epistolary networks, and women’s writing. With Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, she has edited The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women, 1558-1680 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Her current research includes Andrew Marvell, and, with Alison Searle, she is co-general editor of a project that will edit the complete correspondence of Richard Baxter.

Dr. Elliot Kendall  (English) works on the great household and late medieval writers’ engagement with its social dynamics and power (royal and aristocratic). In Lordship and Literature: John Gower and the Politics of the Great Household (OUP, 2008) he focuses on the great household and Gower’s Confessio Amantis, and he is currently working on the household imagination of politics from before the Wars of the Roses to the reign of Henry VIII.

Professor Gerald Maclean  (English) explores how seventeenth-century English writing of all kinds – poetic, historical, dramatic, polemical – contributed to the emergence of national identities. The Rise of Oriental Travel (2004) and Looking East (2007) examine ways imperial ambitions took shape from encounters with the Ottoman Empire, while ‘Britain and the Muslim World’ (in progress) explores Anglo-Islamic relations in the age before ‘Orientalism.’

Professor Nicholas McDowell (English) is interested in the literary, cultural and intellectual history of 17th-century England, specializing in literature and the English Civil Wars, Milton, and Marvell. His new monograph, Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars, will be published in 2008 and he is editing Milton’s 1649 prose. He is a recent winner of a Philip Leverhulme Prize.

Professor Andrew McRae (English) is the author of  books including Literature and Domestic Travel in Early Modern England (CUP, 2009), and Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State (CUP, 2004). He is particularly interested in politics and literature, and the literature of space and place, but more generally with the interface between literature and history. He is currently working on literature and domestic travel in early modern England.

Dr. Edward Paleit  (English) specialises in the literary and intellectual culture of pre-Restoration England. He is particularly interested in the early modern reception and negotiation of antiquity, and therefore in the literary practices associated with Renaissance humanism (reading, composition, translation, imitation). He is currently writing a book entitled War, Liberty and Caesar, on English responses to the Latin poet Lucan from 1590 to 1640.

Dr. Henry Power  (English) works on the literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (especially the period c. 1640-1760), the origins and antecedents of the English novel, and the reception of classical texts and ideas by English writers. One of his currents projects, for which he has been awarded a two-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, is a study of the reception of Virgil’s poetry during the English Civil War.

Professor Philip Schwyzer  (English) has written extensively on Shakespeare and Spenser. He is particularly interested in how Renaissance writers imagine and interact with the ancient and medieval past. His books include Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature (OUP, 2007) and Literature, Nationalism and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (CUP, 2004). He is currently writing a monograph on Shakespeare and the Remains of Richard III. Other projects include “Speaking with the Dead: Histories of Memory in Sacred Space,” funded by the Leverhulme Trust, and “The Past in its Place,” a five-year study of landscape and memory funded by the ERC.  

Dr. Victoria Sparey (English) is interested in representations of the body, medical practices, family relations and gender identity within early modern literature. Whilst her research, to date, has focused upon the drama of Shakespeare, her interests extend to the works of other early modern playwrights and poets (including Thomas Middleton, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, John Ford, John Webster and John Donne).

Dr. Sarah Toulalan (History) has research interests in early modern social and cultural history generally, but most particularly in the body, including issues to do with body size and body management; sex and sexuality; health and medicine; gender and issues relating to age and ageing, especially children and childhood. Her first monograph, Imagining Sex: Pornography and Bodies in Seventeenth-century England was published by Oxford University Press in 2007. She is currently working on a second monograph, Children and Sex in Early Modern England: Knowledge, Consent, Abuse, c.1550-1750 generously funded by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship.