Bath Spa University

Book, Text and Place (1500-1750)

Established in 2002, the Book, Text and Place (1500-1750) Research Centre is concerned with early modern literary culture, place, and the history of the book broadly defined. The Centre's members are Dr Tracey Hill, Dr Ian Gadd, Dr Stephen Gregg, Dr Bronach Kane and Dr Christopher Ivic. Two postgraduate research students, Claire Drake and Jo Howe, are also affiliated with the Centre.

The Centre currently hosts a biannual conference dedicated to the topic of ‘Book Encounters’. Held at Corsham Court, the next conference will take place in 2013’. Keep the link to last summer’s conference programme.

SUMMER CONFERENCE (July 1, 2011) for details see Book Encounters 1500-1750

Aims of the Book, Text and Place Research Centre

to generate internationally recognised research on literature and culture 1500-1750, with special emphases upon space, place and history; textual culture and transmission; writing and cultural belief (gender, race, nation, religion);
to disseminate this research through publication with leading journals and academic presses and through participation at international conferences;
to develop major new collaborative research projects that could lead to individual and multi-authored publications, and to participate in ongoing collaborative research projects;
to offer regular seminars and to organise major conferences in order to bring leading regional, national, and international scholars to Bath Spa;
to provide opportunities for inter-institutional collaboration and for collaboration with archives, libraries and industry bodies, where appropriate;
to foster the work of early career researchers as well as research students;
to continue innovation in the use of digital resources in teaching and learning as well as in research, and disseminate our findings through conferences and publications;
to raise Bath Spa's research profile nationally and internationally.

Recent and Forthcoming Publications

Ian Gadd is a General Editor of the Cambridge Works of Jonathan Swift, and a member of the Advisory Board for the New Oxford Shakespeare. He is volume editor of History of the Book in the West 1455-1700 (Ashgate) and co-editor (with Bertrand Goldgar) of Jonathan Swift, Political Writings 1701-11 (Cambridge University Press). He has been commissioned to edit Volume 1 (1478-1780) of the History of Oxford University Press (Oxford University Press). He has co-edited an edition of Swift's Political Writings 1711-14 (Cambridge University Press, 2008), the research for which was supported by an AHRC Research Leave award. In 2009 he was elected Vice-President of the Society of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP).

Tracey Hill is the author of Anthony Munday and Civic Culture (Manchester University Press 2004). Her second book, Pageantry and Power: a cultural history of the early modern Lord Mayor's Show, was published in 2010 and received the David Bevington Award for Best New Book in Early Drama Studies from the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society. She has recently had an article published in the Guildhall Library Manuscripts Newsletter. Other recent publications include "Representing the awefull authoritie of soueraigne Maiestie": monarchs and mayors in Anthony Munday's: The Triumphes of re-united Britania, in G. Burgess, J. Lawrence and R. Wymer, eds., The Accession of James I: The Historical and Cultural Consequences (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), 15-33; "The Cittie is in an uproare": staging London in The Booke of Sir Thomas More, EMLS, 11:1 (May 2005): http://purl.oclc.org/emls/11-1/more.htm.

Stephen Gregg's publications include the edited anthology Empire and Identity: An Eighteenth-Century Sourcebook (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and Defoe's Writings and Manliness (Ashgate, 2009), the research for which was supported by an AHRC Research Leave award. He has also published in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation and has case studies published by the English Subject Centre. He is working on the issue of masculinity, the male body and empire in the poetry of James Thomson and John Dyer. He is currently researching the life and works of Richard Hurd and developing a collaborative project (with the Early Modern Research Group at the University of Worcester) based on the Hurd Library, Worcester.

Chris Ivic co-edited Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture: lethes legacies (Routledge 2004), in which his essay 'Reassuring Fratricide in 1 Henry IV' appeared. His recent publications include 'Spenser and Interpellative Memory' in Donald Beecher and Grant Williams, eds., Ars Reminiscendi: Mind and Memory in Renaissance Culture (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2009); ‘”Bastard Normans, Norman bastards": anomalous identities in The Life of Henry the Fift’ in Willy Maley and Philip Schwyzer, eds., Shakespeare and Wales (Ashgate, 2010); ‘”The memorye of their noble ancestors": collective memory in early modern Ireland’ in Oona Frawley, ed., Memory Ireland (Syracuse University Press, 2010); and 'Reading Tudor Chronicles' in Margaret Ferguson and Susannah Brietz Monta, eds., Teaching Early Modern Prose (The Modern Language Association of America, 2010). He is currently working on a monograph titled The Subject of Britain.

Bronach Kane is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow, and will take up a lectureship in History at Bath Spa in 2012. She has held research fellowships from the Institute of Historical Research, the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, and Queen Mary, University of London. She works on issues of gender in the late medieval towns and countryside, using church court litigation, and focusing on popular memory practice, and social belonging below the level of the aristocracy. Amongst other publications, she has authored a short monograph Impotence and Virginity in the Late Medieval Ecclesiastical Court of York (2008), and 'Return of the Native: Franciscan Education and Astrological Practice in the Medieval North of England' (2010). She is currently completing two book-length projects, Popular Memory and Gender in Late Medieval England: Men, Women and Testimony in the Church Courts of Canterbury and York, and another on Social Belonging in England, c.1200-1500: Emotion, Friendship and Neighbourliness in Medieval Culture. She has a strong interest in the production and use of knowledge in medieval England, and uses approaches from gender theory and social sciences.

Research Students

Kate Ellis has a BA (Hons) in English Studies and History and an MA in Literary and Historical Studies from Bath Spa University. Her recently completed PhD thesis focused on orality and literacy on the early modern stage, considering particularly Middleton's A Game at Chess (1624), the anonymous play, Dick of Devonshire (1626), and Heywood and Brome's The Witches of Lancashire (1634). She has presented papers on early modern stage directions in manuscript and printed playtexts, on dialect, and on the textual aspects of A Game at Chess, at conferences and seminars in Southampton, Keele and Bath.

Jo Howe completed a BA (Hons) in English Literature at Bath Spa University in 2007 and an MRes in English in 2009, for which she produced a critical edition of part of Heywood's If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody (1605). She began her PhD, a critical edition of Samuel Rowley's When You See Me, You Know Me (1605), in January 2010, under the supervision of Dr Gadd and Dr Hill. Her AHRC-funded research will aim to rehabilitate the play as an important dramatisation of the Henrician Reformation and will draw attention to Rowley as a key figure in the early modern theatre. Jo has also been employed as a research assistant for the History of Oxford University Press project since November 2008.

Claire Drake obtained a First Class degree in English Literature in 2008, and completed the Masters in Research in English Literature at Bath Spa in 2009. Her interests include the City of London, mapping, cultural geography, archival research and gender issues. In early 2011, she began her PhD research, under the supervision of Dr Tracey Hill and Dr Elaine Chalus, studying the representation of prostitutes in a range of early modern popular literature, 1590 – 1620. She is seeking to understand whether there is a relationship between where the prostitutes traded and their business and social status. A central aim of her research is to add to existing knowledge about locations in the City of London, their associations with the prostitution trade in early modern Londoners’ ‘mental maps’ of their city, and the representation of this knowledge in popular literature, including ballads and broadsides.

Visiting Scholars

Kate Morrison is researching a novel set in the print trade in late sixteenth-century London. She has a BA (Hons) in English Literature from New Hall College, Cambridge, where she wrote dissertations on literary representations of Renaissance London and how death was perceived and depicted in early seventeenth-century England. She has subsequently worked as a journalist and press officer. She recently won second prize in the 2011 Asham Award, the UK's foremost award for unpublished women writers (this year judged by the novelist Sarah Waters, writer Polly Samson and Virago publisher Lennie Goodings). Her short ghost story, 'Sam Brown', appears in the Asham Award anthology, 'Something Was There', published by Virago.

Recent and Current Activities

Stephen H. Gregg - Defoe's Writing and Manliness: Contrary Men, Reviewed by George E. Haggerty ... "Stephen H. Gregg has written a timely and much-needed study of Daniel Defoe. It is remarkable to think that a writer of Defoe's stature, who is as concerned as he is with the proper attributes of manliness, has not been the subject of a study like this before now." Read more . . .

Kate Ellis recently delivered a paper titled In the time of which the Boy speakes: the orality of text in early modern stage directions at the University of Southampton's 'Music, Literature, Illustration: Collaboration and networks in English manuscript culture' conference. She also attended this year's 'Print Networks' conference at The Shakespeare Institute. Kate is currently completing her PhD thesis with a view to submission in January 2011.

Ian Gadd delivered a paper titled ‘Fooling Lord Wharton: the second edition of Swift’s The Publick Spirit of the Whigs (1714) at the Gathered Text conference in Oxford in September 2010.

Jo Howe has recently delivered a paper, titled We dare not hold it fit, That we for Justices and Judges sit: The Chronicle History Play in Early Modern London at the University of Sussex’s postgraduate conference. She has also recently participated in a number of conferences and symposia, including: ‘The Gathered Text’, (Oxford, 09/10); ‘The Book Trade in Early Modern Britain’, (Shakespeare Institute, 07/ 10); and the Seminar in Medieval and Tudor London History (Institute of Historical Research, 06/10). She took part in the Bodleian Library’s Rare Books Masterclass, and attended the University of Warwick’s Research Training Programme at the Warburg Institute.

Chris Ivic recently delivered a paper titled "This mighty worke of vnion": Early Jacobean Panegyric' at this year's Renaissance Society of America conference in Venice. He also recently participated in the 'Shakespeare and Wales' symposium at Cardiff University.

Tracey Hill presented a paper titled '‘To prune and dresse the Tree of Gouernment’: political contexts of the London Lord Mayors’ Shows' at the Renaissance Society of America conference in Venice in April 2010.