Habits of Reading in Early Modern England faculty

These scholars contributed to the 1997 Habits of Reading in Early Modern England (NEH Institute). For more information

Director

Steven Zwicker, Professor of English at Washington University, is the author most recently of Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649-1689 (1993). With Kevin Sharpe, he has coedited Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England (1987), Refiguring Revolutions: British Politics and Aesthetics, 1642–1789, and The Cambridge Companion to English Literature: From Andrew Marvell to Alexander Pope. Professor Zwicker has worked extensively on manuscript annotation and marginalia in the rare-book collections of the Clark Library and Huntington Library and has studied the approximately 12,000 titles in the Folger's collection of catalogued English books, 1641-1700, for evidence of the dialogue between texts and their readers.

Faculty

Peter W.M. Blayney, Distinguished Resident Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library, is the author of The Texts of 'King Lear' and Their Origins, vol. 1: Nicholas Okes and the First Quarto (1982), The Bookshops in Paul's Cross Churchyard (1990), and The First Folio of Shakespeare (1991). He is currently working on a history of the Stationers' Company through 1616.

Margaret J.M. Ezell, Professor of English at Texas A&M University, has published The Patriarch's Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (1987) and Writing Women's Literary History (1993). She is completing a study of Publishing and Perishing in the Restoration: Essays Towards a History of the Material Culture of Authorship in Early Modern Britain.

Anthony Grafton is Professor of History at Princeton University. He has published Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Humanism in an Age of Science, 1450-1800 (1991), From Humanism to the Humanities coauthored with Lisa Jardine (1986), and The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe coedited with A. Blair (1990). Commerce with the Classics: The Disciplines of Reading in Renaissance Europe is forthcoming.

Richard Helgerson is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His many published works include Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System (1983). His Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (1992) won the British Council Prize in the Humanities and the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association.

David Scott Kastan is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time (1982), a General Editor of The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series, and, with Peter Stallybrass, editor of Staging the Renaissance: Essays on Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (1991). His forthcoming books include Proud Majesty Made a Subject: Representation and Authority in English Renaissance Drama and the Arden Edition of 1 Henry IV.

Michael Mendle, Professor of History at the University of Alabama, is the author of Dangerous Positions: Mixed Government, the Estates of the Realm, and the Making of the 'Answer to the XIX Propositions' (1985) and Henry Parker and the English Civil War: The Political Thought of the Public's Privado (1995). He is at work on The English Civil War and Political Thought.

Kevin Sharpe is Professor of History at the University of Southampton. In addition to the two volumes of essays coedited with Steven Zwicker and numerous articles on seventeenth-century English history, he has authored The Personal Rule of Charles I (1992) and coedited Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England with Peter Lake (1994).

William H. Sherman, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland at College Park, is the author of John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (1995). He has contributed "Pragmatic Readers: Knowledge Transactions and Scholarly Services in Late Elizabethan England" to the collection Religion, Culture, and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson (1994).

Evelyn Tribble is Associate Professor of English at Temple University. She has published Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (1993). She has contributed "Like a Looking-Glass in the Frame: From Marginal Glosses to Footnotes" to the collection The Margins of the Text (1995). Her "Gender, Social Class, and Literacies in John Foxe's Book of Martyrs" is forthcoming in Popular Literacies.

Laetitia Yeandle is Curator of Manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She is coauthor of two paleography manuals, including Handwriting in England: 1400-1650 with Jean F. Preston (1992). She has edited the text of Hooker's Tractates (1990) and, with Richard Dunn, The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630-1649.