Professor Cathy Shrank
School of English
Faculty Director of One University Strategy Delivery
+44 114 222 8485
Full contact details
School of English
Jessop West
1 Upper Hanover Street
葫芦影业
S3 7RA
- Profile
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My research focuses on early modern (or Renaissance) literature and culture. My interest in this area stems back to my undergraduate days at Cambridge, where a course on comparative literature introduced me to the poetry of the Henrician courtier Thomas Wyatt and his translations of Petrarch. I pursued this interest in early and mid-Tudor writing 鈥 an often neglected part of the canon 鈥 through my Masters and PhD, which looked at formations of English national identity in the decades after the break with Rome.
I moved to 葫芦影业 in 2005, after stints at King鈥檚 College London and the University of Aberdeen.
- Research interests
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My research ranges from the late fifteenth to the late seventeenth century, and moves between poetry, prose, and drama, and between texts in manuscript and print. It also includes less obviously 鈥渓iterary鈥 forms of writing, such as medical or educational works, although I鈥檝e also written on hypercanonical figures like Shakespeare. The eclectic nature of what I study is exemplified by an on-going project on English dialogues: works written in the form of a conversation. These cover all sorts of topics, from teaching skills such as archery or maths, to the behaviour of women, or pressing political issues such as the marriage of Elizabeth I, the role of parliament, or the execution of Mary Queen of Scots.
A lot of my research involves scholarly editing. Projects (completed and on-going) include Shakespeare鈥檚 poems, the works of the Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe, and William Tyndale鈥檚 Parable of the Wicked Mammon. As with the work on dialogues, annotating these texts takes you down often unexpected paths, from working out the date of solar and lunar eclipses to acquiring a detailed knowledge of early modern insults. Soon I will be getting back to where my academic journey began, with an edition of the poems of Thomas Wyatt.
Other forthcoming work includes essays on the marital correspondence of Sir John Cheke, the relationship between literature and history, and a collection of essays (co-edited with Phil Withington) on Thomas More鈥檚 Utopia.
- Publications
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Books
- Writing the nation in Reformation England, 1530-1580. Oxford University Press on Demand.
Edited books
- The Oxford Handbook of Thomas More's Utopia. Oxford University Press.
- . OUP Oxford.
Journal articles
- . Reformation, 24(2), 59-75.
- . Reformation, 21(2), 128-130.
- Doing Away with the Drab Age. Literature Compass.
- Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture, A Companion to The Collected Works. EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES, 13(1), 111-112.
- . European Journal of English Studies, 13(1), 110-112.
- Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets: John Benson and the 1640 Poems. Shakespeare, 5(3), 271-291.
- . Reformation, 13(1), 230-232.
- . Studies in Philology, 105(1), 30-49.
- Trollers and Dreamers: Defining the Citizen-Subject in Sixteenth-Century Cheap Print. Yearbook of English Studies, 38(1/2), 102-118.
- 'But I that knew what harbred in that hed': Thomas Wyatt and his posthumous interpreters. Proceedings of the British Academy, 154, 375-401.
- . Notes and Queries, 53(4), 421-422.
- . Reformation, 11(1), 227-230.
- . Huntington Library Quarterly, 67(2), 295-314.
- . Shakespeare Quarterly, 54(4), 406-423.
- . Reformation, 5(1), 1-26.
- . Huntington Library Quarterly, 73, 523-541.
Chapters
- Rewriting Robert the Devil: Thomas Lodge and Medieval Romance In Donoghue D, Sobecki S & Watson N (Ed.), Form and Power in Medieval And Early Modern Literature (pp. 241-258). Boydell & Brewer
- , History in the Humanities and Social Sciences (pp. 286-305). Cambridge University Press
- , The Oxford History of Poetry in English (pp. 405-421). Oxford University Press
- , The Cambridge Connection in Tudor England (pp. 232-251). BRILL
- The Shakespeare manuscripts In Erne L (Ed.), The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Textual Studies (pp. 53-70). Bloomsbury
- , Early Modern Literature and England's Long Reformation (pp. 7-23). Routledge
- , Memory and the English Reformation (pp. 334-350). Cambridge University Press
- , Enacting the Bible in medieval and early modern drama Manchester University Press
- Legends, Shrines and Ruined Tombs Memory and Reformation in Female-Voiced Complaint, MEMORY AND THE ENGLISH REFORMATION (pp. 334-349).
- In Nicholas L & Law C (Ed.), Roger Ascham and His Sixteenth-Century World (pp. 208-225). Brill
- 鈥楳asters of civility: Castiglione鈥檚 Courtier, Della Casa鈥檚 Galateo and Guazzo鈥檚 Civil Conversation in early modern England鈥 In Marrapodi M (Ed.), The Routledge Research Companion to Anglo-Italian Renaissance Literature and Culture (pp. 144-159). Routledge
- , ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH COMPANION TO ANGLO-ITALIAN RENAISSANCE LITERATURE AND CULTURE (pp. 144-159).
- , The Complete Poems of Shakespeare (pp. 269-623). Routledge
- , The Complete Poems of Shakespeare (pp. 251-267). Routledge
- , The Complete Poems of Shakespeare (pp. xiii-xv). Routledge
- , The Complete Poems of Shakespeare (pp. 625-661). Routledge
- Mocking or Mirthful? Laughter in early modern dialogue In Knights MJ & Morton A (Ed.), The Power of Laughter and Satire in Early Modern Britain: Political and Religious Culture, 1500-1820 Boydell & Brewer
- Cross Sections (I): 1516-1520 In Keymer T (Ed.), The Oxford History of the Novel in English, vol. 1 (pp. 46-54). Oxford University Press
- On Error In Loffman C & Phillips H (Ed.), A Handbook of Editing Early Modern Texts (pp. 139-146). Routledge
- Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Imprint previously known as Arden Shakespeare
- Finding a Vernacular Voice: The Classical Translations of Sir Thomas Wyatt In Copeland R (Ed.), The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature: Volume 1: 800-1558 (pp. 583-600). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Diss茅quer le corps politique: la Couronne et le Parlement dans les dialogues politiques anglais du d茅but du XVIIe si猫cle In Bouhaik-Girones M (Ed.), Usages et strat茅gies pol茅miques en Europe, XIVe-premier XVIIe si猫cle (pp. 155-166). Peter Lang
- Mise-en-page, 鈥渢he Authors Genius鈥, 鈥渢he capacity of the Reader鈥, and the ambition of 鈥榓 Good Compositer鈥, In Archer C & Peters L (Ed.), Religion and the Book Trade (pp. 66-82). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
- All talk and no action? Early modern political dialogue, The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Prose (pp. 27-42). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Beastly Metamorpohoses: Losing Control in Early Modern Literary Culture In Herring J (Ed.), Intoxication and Society (pp. 193-209). Palgrave MacMillan
- Oxford University Press
- 1553, Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Vol 1 (pp. 537-547). Oxford University Press
- Society In Kinney AF (Ed.), Elizabethan and Jacobean England Wiley-Blackwell
- The Politics of Shakespeare's Sonnets In Armitage D, Condren C & Fitzmaurice A (Ed.), Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought (pp. 101-118). Cambridge University Press
- The Travails of Tudor Literature In Pincombe M & Shrank C (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature:1485-1603 (pp. 1-19). OUP Oxford
- In Shrank C & Pincombe M (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature: 1485-1603
- 'Sir Thomas Elyot and the Bonds of Community' In Shrank C (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature (pp. 154-169). Oxford University Press
- Stammering, snoring and other problems in Early Modern dialogue In Blakeley J & Pincombe M (Ed.), Writing and Reform in Sixteenth-Century England (pp. 179-192).
- John Bale and reconfiguring the 'medieval' in Reformation England, READING THE MEDIEVAL IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND (pp. 179-+).
- , The Oxford Handbook of Thomas More's Utopia (pp. 1-16). Oxford University Press
- , The Oxford Handbook of Thomas More's Utopia (pp. 231-247). Oxford University Press
- , A Companion to Renaissance Poetry (pp. 376-388). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
- John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
- , Edmund Spenser in Context (pp. 176-184). Cambridge University Press
- , A Mirror for Magistratesin Context (pp. 109-125). Cambridge University Press
- , A Social History of England, 1500鈥1750 (pp. 19-38). Cambridge University Press
- , The Shakespeare Circle (pp. 49-56). Cambridge University Press
- , Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought (pp. 101-118). Cambridge University Press
- Manuscript, Authenticity and 'evident proofs' against the Scottish Queen (pp. 198-218).
Book reviews
- WILLIAM TYNDALE A very brief history. TLS-THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT(5985), 12-12.
Conference proceedings papers
- (pp 19-34)
Scholarly editions
- The Complete Poems of Shakespeare. Routledge.
Dictionary/encyclopaedia entries
- Community. In Cultural Reformations Oxford University Press.
- Writing the nation in Reformation England, 1530-1580. Oxford University Press on Demand.
- Research group
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I welcome applications from potential research students in any area of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature and culture.
Current and former PhDs include projects on Post-War Polish productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream; Drayton鈥檚 Poly-olbion; representations of Thomas Wolsey from Skelton to Shakespeare; Tudor women writers; a comparative study of the influence of Galen in England and Italy; and editions of a number of important early manuscripts (Burley; V&A Dyce MS 44; BL Harleian MS 7392(2); BL Additional MS 36529).
- Teaching activities
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My teaching at undergraduate and Masters level mainly focuses on the period 1500-1800.