David Norbrook

This page reflects a scholar's association with the Folger Institute.

Merton Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford. He is the author of Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics 1627–1660 (1999); with Henry Woudhuysen, The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse (1992); and Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (1984).

Long-term fellowship

Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs: Life-Writing, History, and Revolution (Mellon, 2014-2015)

I would work on a study of Lucy Hutchinson (1620-81) as autobiographer and historian, centred on her Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. This work has long been accepted as a classic of seventeenth-century historical writing, yet its author has remained in the work’s shadows. I propose to relate the Memoirs to new information about her life and to an extensive but neglected canon of other writings, from a translation of Lucretius to religious verse and prose, demonstrating the sometimes surprising combination of strongly secular analysis with Protestant millennialism. I shall consider the Memoirs not just as a work of transcription and familial reminiscence but as the product of a woman intellectual who shaped her experiences in the light of her own combination of literary ambition, religious commitment, political ideology, and family loyalty. I shall explore the ways she negotiated the particular pressures that came from being a woman writing on controversial subjects, a republican with close royalist relatives, and a Puritan deeply interested in an atheistical poet. Study of the Folger’s exceptionally rich primary and secondary sources in seventeenth-century literature and history and of its manuscripts by contemporary women will help to define more closely what was distinctive about her own profile as a writer.

Scholarly Programs

Participant, Comus: A Workshop (A Spring 2001 Weekend Workshop held on 23–24 March 2001)

Director, Women Intellectuals and Political Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (A Spring 2001 Semester-Length Seminar)