The Early Modern Pathway: Modules

Whether you want to develop the research skills necessary for a PhD, deepen your knowledge and appreciation of early modern literature and culture, or expand your horizons and enhance your employability, the Early Modern pathway has much to offer. Students on the pathway are part of the Sheffield Centre for Early Modern Studies (SCEMS), with access to numerous research events and seminars.

From John Milton, Paradise Lost, 4th edn (1688), Special Collections, University of Sheffield

Writing the : Texts and Contexts (autumn, 15 credits) A defining feature of the Renaissance was the interplay between two divergent aspects of its cultural heritage: the literature of classical Greece and Rome, and the Bible. This team-taught module explores how medieval and early modern writers responded to key Biblical and classical texts. It traces how these were adapted and readapted by authors, working in and for different cultures and contexts, from Chaucerian England to the Restoration.

Writing the Renaissance: Methods and Approaches (autumn, 15 credits) This team-taught module looks at ways in which scholars working on late medieval and early modern periods approach the texts and topics they study, and the issues raised when endeavouring to understand, or categorise, works from a different era. Particular approaches explored include: linguistic analysis, rhetoric, gender/sexuality, periodisation, authorship, and the materiality of texts.

Early Modern (autumn, 15 credits) This module teaches students to read English handwriting, 1500-1700, an essential skill for research in the period. The course will look at the most common hands of the period (secretary, Jacobean court hand, italic), as well as some of the more specialist (such as Chancery hands). It will also cover conventions for transcription, brevigraphs (and other abbreviations), and dating hands. There will also be some consideration of editing for modern editions.

Early Modern Books (spring, 15 credits; new for 2013-14) ‘Whatever they may do, authors do not write books. Books are not written at all. They are manufactured by scribes and other artisans, by mechanics and engineers, and by printing presses and other machines’ (Roger E. Stodhard). This module examines the processes which created the works that early modern audiences experienced, in and print, or as performance. Topics covered on the module include the production, licensing, dissemination, reception, and censorship of literary works. Knowledge of these processes, and the practical constraints and contingencies attendant on them, enriches our appreciation of how early moderns perceived the books they read/owned and the performances they witnessed, and gives insight into the often collaborative and contested nature of ‘authorship’. The module will also consider the role of the modern scholarly editor.

Directed Reading: Topics in Early Modern Literature (autumn or spring, 15 credits) Designed to prepare students for dissertations on medieval and early modern topics, this module offers the opportunity to follow a tailor-made reading programme which lays the foundations for work that can be developed further in the dissertation.

The Country House and the English Literary Imagination: Literature, Culture, Politics (spring, 30 credits) The country seats of the landed gentry and aristocracy are a lens through which we can examine many of the pressing social, cultural and political issues of early modern England and beyond. Topics examined include: the relationship between social groups; gender and space; religion; scandal and domestic disharmony; houses and gardens as sites of literary production, consumption, and philosophical reflection; estates and their content as sources of identity and self-fashioning; migration between the metropolis and country; the influence of travel and the architectural design of houses as a changing barometer of .

Literature and Language in the Work Place (spring/autumn, 15 credits) This module aims to give students insight into a work environment (e.g. a library, gallery/museum, theatre, school) in order to develop their discipline-specific vocational skills. The module will also promote reflection on the issues involved in disseminating and utilising knowledge of language and/or literature outside academia. Students will choose a placement from those offered at the start of the academic year and will work on a defined project agreed between the academic co-ordinator and the partner institution (the employer). The module may be of particular interest to those students not planning to pursue a PhD after their MA.

In addition to these and other modules offered within the School of English, our students also have opportunities to take modules in Latin and modern languages (e.g. Italian, French, Spanish, German) or in . Details of early modern modules offered by the History Department can be found at: http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/history/ma/earlymodern/content.

Dissertation (summer, 60 credits) All our students produce a 15,000-word dissertation over the summer on a topic of their own choosing, with the support and guidance of an expert in the field. Further support for the dissertation is provided through research workshops and all MA students have a PhD mentor.

The Early Modern Team

Dr Nicky Hallett ([email protected]) has a special interest in self-writing and auto/biography. Recently she has been working on manuscripts compiled by English nuns in exile, and is author of Lives of Spirit: Carmelite Self-Writing of the Early Modern Period (2007), Witchcraft, Exorcism and the Politics of Possession in a Seventeenth-Century Convent (2007), and The in Early Modern Religion: Convents of Pleasure, 1600-1800 (2013). She is an academic advisor to the Who Were the Nuns? project at Queen Mary, University of London, and principal editor of a volume arising from this work, English Convents in Exile, 1600-1800: Life- Writing (2012). Research interests: representation of nuns and religious women; editing; literature, religion and politics; sensory history; disability

Dr Marcus Nevitt ([email protected]) specialises in seventeenth-century literature. He is the author of Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England (Ashgate, 2006), a study of the relationships between cheap print and female agency in the English Civil wars, as well as articles and essays on Ben Jonson, news writing, and interregnum royalism. He is currently working on the poet-dramatist and Shakespeare adapter, Sir William Davenant, and preparing a book on Poetry and the Art of English Newswriting, which explores the birth of the poet-journalist in the mid seventeenth century. Research interests: seventeenth- century literature; writing of the 1650s; early modern women’s writing; pamphlets and news; the civil war afterlives of Renaissance writers

Dr Emma Rhatigan ([email protected]) works on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, in particular the literary culture of the Inns of Court (England’s ‘third university’) and the genre of early modern sermon, locating it within the broader political, religious, and performance cultures of early modern London. She is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon (2011) and is currently editing Donne’s Inns of Court sermons for the AHRC-funded Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne. Research interests: Donne; place and performance; manuscript and print; religious and devotional writing, including sermons; editing

Dr Tom Rutter ([email protected]) joined the University in September 2012. He is the author of Work and Play on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge, 2008) and The Cambridge Introduction to Christopher Marlowe (2012), as well as various book chapters and articles on early modern drama. He is an editor of the journal Shakespeare, and is currently working on a book on the Admiral’s Men playing company. Research interests: early modern drama; Shakespeare; Marlowe; playing companies

Prof Cathy Shrank ([email protected]) is a Tudor specialist; she is the author of Writing the Nation in Reformation England (Oxford, 2004), as well as numerous essays and articles on topics ranging from canonical writers such as Shakespeare and Thomas Wyatt to representations of intoxication and the vitriolic propaganda surrounding the fall and execution of Mary Queen of Scots. She is the co-editor of the prize-winning Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature (2009). As well as editing Coriolanus for the new Norton Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s sonnets for Longman Annotated English Poets, she is working towards a book on non-dramatic dialogue. Research interests: sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century

writing, including less obviously ‘literary’ forms, such as medical writing; editing; sonnets; dialogue; manuscript and print; interactions between literature and politics; travel and translation

Dr Graham Williams ([email protected]) is Lecturer in the History of English, and has special interests and expertise in the late medieval and early modern periods (c.1350-1650). In particular, he works with letters (in manuscript and digital form) to investigate earlier Englishes in an interactional context. From 2009-2012, he worked as a Research Associate for the early modern letter-editing project, Bess of Hardwick's Letters: The Complete Correspondence, c.1550-1608 (web-edition forthcoming); and is currently finishing a book entitled Utterance in (Con)text: A Study of the Letters of Joan and Maria Thynne, 1575-1611. He is also developing research in the area of (im)politeness in the history of English and has published articles in this vein with English Studies and The Journal of Historical Pragmatics. Research interests: letters, (im)politeness and pragmatics; digital corpora; palaeography

T.B., The rebellion of Naples (1649), Special Collections, University of Sheffield