Early Modern research
Our research considers the early modern period at its widest temporal and spatial parameters and offers a research community that produces cutting edge and internationally excellent research across Reformation and early modern studies. A small selection of our current and recent projects are explored below.
Social Bodies
Material Identities, Social Bodies: Embodiment in British Letters c.1680-1820
Social BodiesThis Leverhulme Trust funded project is led by Professor Karen Harvey. It examines descriptions of everyday experiences of the body in the long eighteenth century. Using familiar letters written between 1680 and 1820, the project examines gender, race, and rank alongside the factors of age, religion and social relationship.
Middling Culture
Dr Tara Hamling (History)
Middling CultureMiddling Culture is a major Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project that aims to transform our understanding of how reading, writing, and material culture fitted into the everyday lives of England’s “middling” people—neither the very rich nor the very poor—in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These were the literate, urban households whose members engaged with a variety of cultural forms for work and beyond.
Editing Aphra Behn
Professor Gillian Wright (Department of English Literature
Aphra Behn onlineThe Cambridge Edition of the Works of Aphra Behn will make available fully annotated scholarly texts of Behn’s plays, prose fiction, poetry, translations, and letters. The collective work of twenty contributing editors, the edition is led by four General Editors: Elaine Hobby, Claire Bowditch, Mel Evans, and Gillian Wright.
Printers' Ornaments
Compositor
Compositor'Compositor' is a database of eighteenth-century printers’ ornaments, created by Hazel Wilkinson. Eighteenth-century books were highly decorated and decorative. Their pages were adorned with ornaments that ranged from small floral embellishments to large and intricate head- and tailpieces, depicting all manner of people, places, and things. Compositor includes ornaments cut by hand in blocks of wood or metal, as well as cast ornaments, engravings, and fleurons (ornamental typography).
Experiencing Shakespeare's Theatres: Playgoing Pleasure and Judgement
Dr Simon Smith (Shakespeare Institute)
Playgoing, Pleasure and JudgementThis research project, supported by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship and forthcoming as a monograph from Cambridge University Press, explores early audience responses to drama, with a focus on the particular ideas of pleasure and judgement often invoked in the period. It asks exactly what it meant to be pleased by a play, or to judge a performance, in early modern England.