Our research on the early-modern period deals with the literary and cultural production of the period 1550 to 1660. Its key topics include the forms in which literature was produced and reproduced (manuscripts, texts, books and theatre), their wider connections to material and social cultures and the ways in which both literature and culture have been reproduced in the historiography of the period.
Since 2005 the early-modern research group (Maureen Bell, John Jowett, Kate Mcluskie, Martin Wiggins and Robert Wilcher) has been further enhanced by new lecturers (Hugh Adlington, Tom Lockwood, Kathryn Prince and Gillian Wright) and by externally funded research fellows (Tara Hamling and Kate Rumbold).
Our researchers have published widely and made presentations at numerous conferences, and we receive major support from grants from the AHRC, the RCUK/Roberts fund, The Bibliographical Society and The Society for Renaissance Studies.
The Shakespeare Institute with its fine library and its critical mass of research students provides a valuable focal point for research in this field. In Stratford-upon-Avon, researchers have access to the collections of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and in Birmingham, the resources of the University special collections are augmented by those of the Birmingham Shakespeare Library.
Important recent publications from early modern researchers include:
Catherine Alexander
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Shakespeare, Henry VIII for Penguin. Co-editing the forthcoming Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature vol 2, 1500-1700 and editing The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Last Plays. Working on a biography of Elizabeth Montagu. Recently completed the illustrated and documented Shakespeare: The Life, The Works, The Treasures for Andre Deutsch and the RSC.
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‘Divination in Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica ', in 'A Man Very Well Studyed': Contexts for Thomas Browne, eds Kathryn Murphy and Richard Todd (Leiden : Brill Intersections, 2008).
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‘John Donne and Canon Law', in The Reformation Unsettled: British Literature and the Question of Religious Identity, 1560-1660, ed. J. F. van Dijkhuizen (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2008).
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A Chronology and Calendar of Documents relating to the London Book Trade 1641-1700, by D.F.McKenzie and M. Bell. 3 vols. (OUP, 2005). ISBN: 0-19-818410-7 (vol.I); 0-19-818176-0 (vol. II); 0-19-928558-6 (vol. III). Pages: 643 (vol. 1); 458 (vol. II); 468 (vol. III).
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'Booksellers without an author, 1627-1685' in Thomas Middleton and Early Modern
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Textual Culture, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, Oxford University Press (2007) pp.260-85
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The British Book Trade Index on the Web: [ongoing]
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To see or not to see? The Presence of Religious Imagery in the Protestant Household' Art History, 30, 2, (April, 2007) pp.170-197
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[editor, with Richard L. Williams] Art Re-formed? Re-assessing the Impact of the Reformation on the Visual Arts (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007).
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Thomas Middleton, Collected Works, gen. ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, assoc. ed. MacD.P. Jackson, John Jowett, Valerie Wayne, and Adrian Weiss; and Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture, by the editors (OUP, 2007)
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Shakespeare and Text (OUP, 2007)
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‘Editing Shakespeare's Plays in the Twentieth Century', Shakespeare Survey 59 (2006), 1-19
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‘From Print to Performance: Looking at the Masque in Timon of Athens', in From Performance to Print in Shakespeare's England, ed. Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 73-91
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William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton, Timon of Athens, ed. John Jowett (OUP, 2004)
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William Shakespeare, Richard III, ed. John Jowett (OUP, 2000)
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William Shakespeare, Complete Works, and William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, ed. Wells, Taylor, Jowett, and Montgomery (OUP, 1986, revised edn. 2005).
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‘“The hazzard of grosse mistakes in ignorant Transcribers”: A New Manuscript Text of Sir Robert Stapylton's Musaeus on the Loves of Hero and Leander', English Manuscript Studies, 1100-1700, 13 (2007), 250-69.
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with Martin White, ed., Arden of Faverhsam, revised edition, New Mermaids (London: A&C Black, 2007)
Kate McLuskie
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‘Is All Well? Shakespeare's Play with Narratives', Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 142, 2006, ISSN 1430-2527, 78-96
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‘Unending Revels: Visual Pleasure and Compulsory Shakespeare in Diana Henderson, ed. Shakespeare on Screen, Oxford: Blackwell, 2006 238-249
Kathryn Prince
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Articles in Eighteenth Century Women and Borrowers and Lenders: the Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation.
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Chapter on Shakespeare in the Victorian children's periodicals forthcoming in Shakespeare and Childhood, ed. Kate Chedgzoy, Susanne Greenhalgh, and Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
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Three entries forthcoming in Dictionary of Literary Biography.
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Shakespeare in the Victorian Periodicals, forthcoming from Routledge, 2008.
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A performance history of Much Ado About Nothing is under contract with Manchester UP.
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'Quoting Shakespeare in the eighteenth-century novel', Borrowers and Lenders: the Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, Vol II.2 (Fall/Winter 2006)
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‘”So common-hackneyed in the eyes of men”: Banal Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Novel', Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize (runner-up) Literature Compass 4 (3) (May 2007)
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A Woman Killed with Kindness and Other Plays, Oxford English Drama (2008).
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William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, introduction to the revised edition, New Penguin Shakespeare (2005).
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‘Shakespeare Jesuited: The Plagiarisms of “Pater Clarcus”', The Seventeenth Century (2005).
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‘Things that go Bump in the Text: Captain Thomas Stukely', Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 98 (2004).
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John Ford, Tis Pity Shes a Whore, New Mermaids (2003).
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Shakespeare and the Drama of his Time, Oxford Shakespeare Topics (2000).
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The Discontented Cavalier: The Work of Sir John Suckling in its Social, Religious, Political, and Literary Contexts (University of Delaware Press, 2007)
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The Writing of Royalism 1628-1660 (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
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Articles in journals including Shakespeare Survey, Critical Quarterly, Cahiers Elisabéthains, Seventeenth Century; and contributions to biographical dictionaries including the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
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Co-editor (with Dr Jill Seal Millman of the University of Warwick) of the anthology Early Modern Women's Manuscript Poetry ( Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). Winner of the Josephine Roberts Memorial Prize offered by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women, 2006.
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'The Politics of Revision in Daniel's Civil Wars'. Forthcoming in English Literary Renaissance.
For details of conferences, prizes etc., please click on individual names above.
For more detail of research themes in the Early Modern period, several of which contribute to the cross-period theme of Materiality of the Text, please click below: