CREMS Research
Research in CREMS 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.
Middling Culture
Dr Tara Hamling (History)
Middling 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.
Middling Culture
Editing Aphra Behn
Professor Gillian Wright (Department of English Literature
The 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.
Aphra Behn online
Experiencing Shakespeare's Theatres: Playgoing Pleasure and Judgement
Dr Simon Smith (Shakespeare Institute)
This 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.
Playgoing, Pleasure and Judgement