Mediaeval and Renaissance

The Medieval and Renaissance research group supports scholars and postgraduate researchers in the School of English working on literature from the Anglo-Saxon period through to the eighteenth century. The group has its own budget, and hosts a number of staff and postgraduate seminars and reading groups. It also provides research infrastructure and culture for two period-based MLitt programmes, the MLitt in Mediaeval English and the MLitt in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literary Culture.

Postgraduate research students working in the fields of Mediaeval and/or Renaissance literature automatically become associate members of the MedRen group, taking advantage of its many research resources and opportunities. These include the Folger Institute Consortium Collaboration; a supported programme of visiting speakers, colloquia and conferences listed on Research Events; the St Andrews Institute of Mediaeval Studies, the Renaissance and Early Modern Network, CMEMLL (the Centre for Mediaeval and Early Modern Law and Literature). Both the speakers’ programme and RemNet offer opportunities for staff and postgraduates to share work-in-progress. Staff and students in the MedRen group are strong supporters of the development of the University of St Andrews Special Collections of early printed books and manuscripts.

 Recent and current staff research projects include the mapping of English vernacular lives of Christ in the Geographies of Orthodoxy project, conducted in collaboration with Queen’s University, Belfast; Professor Neil Rhodes’ and Professor Andrew Hadfield’s MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translations series; Professor Lorna Hutson’s series of critical monographs, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture and Dr Chris Jones’s work as commissioning editor for Boydell and Brewer’s Medievalism series. Primarily, however, staff research takes the form of writing high-quality monographs and articles; of scholarly editing; and of the editing of critical collections on literature from the Anglo-Saxon period to the eighteenth century. Recent and current PhD topics include the supernatural in Medieval English and Scottish literature; the translation of Villon into English literary culture; penance and confession in psalmic poetry and prose of the sixteenth century; legal bonds in English and Spanish Renaissance drama; the reception of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 1609-1790; seventeenth-century English devotional poetry; Ben Jonson and ‘character’; sovereignty and lawmaking violence on the Renaissance stage.

Staff

Dr Matthew Augustine, Dr Margaret Connolly, Dr Alex Davis, Prof Lorna Hutson, Dr Ian Johnson, Dr Chris Jones, Prof Andrew Murphy, Dr Jane Pettegree, Dr Rhiannon Purdie, Dr Christine Rauer, Prof Neil Rhodes, Dr Louise Wilson

Postgraduates

Faith Acker, Tamara Bowler, Scott Brooks, Chera Cole, Katherine Cooper, Julia Essenburg, Stuart Farley, Dustin Frazier, Elizabeth Hanna Rachel Holmes, Toria Johnson, Rebecca Kerry, Jennifer Key, Doyeeta Majumder, Claire Pascolini-Campbell, Akihiko Shimizu

Illustrations on this page:

Floriated Border, Book of Hours, University of St Andrews Special Collections

Titlepage, In Omnes M. Tulli Ciceronis Orationes (Lyons, 1554), given to St Leonard¹s College, University of St Andrews, by James, Earl of Moray (1531-1570)

Cherub (detail from titlepage of Megale Chymia, vel Magna Alchymia, 1583)