CRRS Fellows
For more info on eligibility and application for our CRRS Fellowships, please visit our CRRS Fellowship page.
David Adkins (Northwest Nazarene University)
“Milton and the Myths of Sacred History ”
While Paradise Lost obviously makes an argument against Calvinist predestination, there is far more in Milton’s poetry that contests Calvin’s theology and vision of reality. For Calvin, reforming Christianity involved, among other things, ridding it of the “inane fables” that had arisen in the tradition, such as the Harrowing of Hell, the Lucifer myth, and many other stories which he deemed suitable only for poets or children. I argue that Milton’s epic poems aim to restore to sacred history these narratives of great dramatic and imaginative power, and thus offer to reformed Christians an alternative to Calvin’s demythologized world.
Marvin Lee Anderson (University of Toronto)
“Exile, Expulsion, and Religious Refugees in the Early Modern Era”
My research project spans the progenitorial theological influence and historiographical import of late medieval Eckhartian and Taulerian mystical writings on Luther’s adversarial radical reformers. It incorporates a critical re-examination of the consequential ecclesiastical and political repercussions of dissent resulting in exile and expulsion for Karlstadt and Müntzer and other sixteenth-century radical reformers and ‘Spiritualists’ and future ones like Jacob Boehme who reconceptualized and prioritized the authority of the Inner Word over the Outer Word. In my recent paper for the 2024 Sixteenth Century Society and Conference here in Toronto, “Luther/an Conspired Suppression of the Schwärmerei Pestilence,” I discussed Luther’s vitriolic attack on those Schwärmer or so-called ‘enthusiasts’ whose ideas “swarmed” or flew about like bees, notably Müntzer and Karlstadt. Luther’s indiscriminate and blanket generalizations of the Schwärmerei typified the subsequent Lutheran campaign to vilify dissident voices and perceived enemies within and outside of Christendom.
William Barker (University of King’s College, Halifax)
“The Colloquies of Erasmus; Edition of William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat“
Project description Incoming
Senior Fellow
Kamran Bashir (University of Toronto)
“Translating Islam in Early Modern England: European Encounters with the Qur’an, 1649–1734“
Kamran Bashir is a historian of Islamic intellectual history specializing in the history of Qur’anic interpretation. His research examines the circulation of exegetical ideas across linguistic, regional, and scholarly networks, exploring how manuscript traditions, print culture, translation, and transregional intellectual exchange shaped the development of Qur’anic interpretation. His first monograph, The Qur’an in South Asia: Hermeneutics, Qur’an Projects and Imagining of Islamic Tradition in British India (Routledge, 2022), investigates the emergence of modern hermeneutics in colonial South Asia.
At the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, his current research explores how English translations and interpretations of the Qur’an transformed European understandings of Islam between 1649 and 1734. Drawing on the rare book collections of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library and the CRRS, the project examines the transmission of Qur’anic knowledge and the intellectual encounters between Europe and the Muslim world in the early modern period.
Brian Bitar (University of Toronto)
“Hobbes’s Psychology and the Origins of the Modern Concept of Power”
I am working on a book manuscript, Hobbes’s Psychology and the Origins of the Modern Concept of Power, a critical study of Hobbes’s development of the idea of power. I interpret Hobbes’s conception of desire for power as the principle of his psychology. The book reconstructs Hobbes’s argument, including its basis in his scientific metaphysics, from premises to the concluding notion of desire for power, the author’s most complete attempt at grounding a non-teleological psychology. Finally, I question the plausibility of such a psychology of power and explore its ambivalent place within Hobbes’s moral-political science of justice.
Kenneth Borris (McGill University)
“Spenser, Sidney, and Early Modern Verbal-Visual Poetics”
An inquiry into the verbal-visual dimensions of early modern poetics as reflected in the major texts of Edmund Spenser (The Shepheardes Calender and The Faerie Queene) and Sir Philip Sidney (his Arcadias). The total results will include a facsimile edition of Spenser’s illustrated Calender analysed according to book history and iconographical study (now published), and a monograph primarily addressing Spenser’s Faerie Queene , particularly the Pastorella Cantos that conclude its final completed book (manuscript in progress).
Senior Fellow
Jonathan Hart (University of Toronto)
“Shakespeare, Language and Colonization”
I have been working in the archives on many projects, including two books coming out this year, Language in Literature and Language in Colonization, Renaissance Poetry and Shakespeare From Interpoetics to Translation, as well as editing a special issue on reading. A number of related books and articles have come out or will come out, in French and English, this year as I have been combining critical, scholarly and creative projects, all of which draw on CRRS and other archives.
Senior Fellow
Agnes Juhasz-Ormsby (Memorial University of Newfoundland)
“Early Sixteenth-Century Sammelbandë of Erasmus’ Educational Works”
Early sixteenth-century pedagogical Sammelbandë or textbook packages provide insights into both the operations of the schoolbook market and the ways particular pedagogical materials and methods were promulgated, updated, and tailored to a specific community of readers, often through interconnected personal and professional networks of educators and printers. My research focuses on composite or so-called trade volumes of educational texts associated with Erasmus’s wider circle in England and Continental Europe and explores the multifaceted ways Erasmian pedagogical texts were revised, repackaged, and rededicated to promote a more broadly conceived educational program to both students and the general public.
Senior Fellow
Rosalind Kerr (University of Alberta)
“The Alchemic Actress and the 16th-century Commedia dell’Arte: Where Art and Nature Meet…”
I am continuing my research into the alchemic properties of the commedia dell’arte with special attention to the role of the actresses as they transformed their physical bodies into symbols through word and deed as they brought neoplatonic images and discourses to life on the stage. I am studying the evidence we have of their powers to affect their audiences to participate in this process so that they too underwent a transmutation which connected them to the divine. My research is interested in explaining how the early actresses gained the status of divas. Of special interest is the importance the actresses attached to conceal their Nature in their Art.
Senior Fellow
Chris Klippenstein (CRRS Fellow)
“‘Our Good Neighbours’: Spectatorship and Fairy Neighbourship on the Early Modern Stage”
With the help of this CRRS fellowship, I am developing my research on ‘atypical’ neighbourship on the early modern English stage. I argue that the dynamics between early modern neighbours could also extend to nonhuman entities such as fairies, and that theatrical spectatorship was a crucial means by which the social and spatial bonds between neighbours were tested. My current research, which includes less-studied as well as canonical plays, focuses on fairy spectatorship in the context of neighbourly threats, opportunities, and obligations.
Natalia Khomenko (York University)
“From Shakespeare’s Russia to Russia’s Shakespeare: Literary Spaces, Library Collections, and Soft Power”
My project traces intercultural encounters between Russia and the Anglophone West from the sixteenth century to the present, with a focus on Shakespearean drama as a contact zone. At CRRS, I look at Russia’s growing importance in the English political imagination during the sixteenth and seventeen centuries, focusing on the circulation of theatrical fantasies in which Russia figures as a cultural cypher – neither Europe nor Asia; religiously opaque; and largely situated outside of the European colonial project – and a potent political threat. I examine these fantasies as an early form of soft power and, as such, an important precursor to the Shakespeare-based Anglo-Russian exchanges in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
David Lawrence (Glendon College, York University and University of Guelph)
England’s Merchant Soldiers: Civic Militarism and Martial Performance on the Eve of the Civil War
My project explores martial culture and civic militarism in Early Modern Britain, particularly as it relates to the creation of provincial private military companies of merchants, artisans and craftsmen who mimicked the military (or artillery) companies founded in London in the 1610s and 1620s. I am very interested in the performative nature of these volunteer organizations, including their participation in grand performances staged for monarchs, drilling and martial displays on holidays, marching in funerals for local dignitaries and welcoming nobles and government officials to their towns. I am also working on a primary source reader on war and society in Early Modern Europe.
Senior Fellow
Guilio Leghissa (University of Toronto )
Ancient Indo-Mediterranean Trade and its Influence on Early Modern European Views of Indian Trade in Holland and England: The Cases of Hugo Grotius and Sir Walter Raleigh
My project proposal will pave the way for the interdisciplinary study of Indo-European (and Mediterranean) relations through history. I intend to study the reception of Classical literary sources dealing with India and Indian trade during the Hellenistic and Roman periods (Arrian, Pliny the Elder, Strabo, the Anonymous’ Periplous of the Eryhthraean Sea) in early modern Europe, particularly in England, France, and Holland through the works of Hugo Grotius, Walter Raleigh, Pier Daniel Huet and Montesquieu (and others). By doing so, I will show how modern European relations with India through trade have been shaped by Classical Mediterraneocentric, moralist, mercantilistic, and proto-colonialist discourses and tropes, thus affecting the very essence of Europe-India relations until the colonial era (nineteenth century).
Emiro Martinez Osorio (York University)
“Fashioning Nobility: The Portraits of Indigenous Elites at Sutatausa”
On the walls of the church of Saint John the Baptist in the village of Sutatausa, there are three portraits of members of the local indigenous elite, two males dressed in Spanish attire, and one female wearing a woven mantle (manta Muisca) with elaborate geometric motifs. These portraits may offer one of the earliest examples of Indigenous subjects who posed as sitters for an artist in the region that became known as the New Kingdom of Granada (present day Colombia). Focusing on the accessories and the clothing worn by these individuals, my research shows how fashion and visual art allowed indigenous elites in New Granada to establish their nobility using local and European markers of legitimacy and status. In addition, considering how these portraits present indigenous subjects as producers and consumers of valuable commodities, my research shows how the sacred space was both local and global, and served as a dynamic stage for the negotiation and transformation of the meaning of kinship.
Vanessa McCarthy (University of Toronto)
Title Incoming
Project Description Incoming
Joshua McEvilla (University of Toronto)
“Database of Newsbook Advertisements, 1646-1668 “
As I complete my research for a scholarly edition of John Cotgrave’s The English Treasury of Wit and Language, I am wrapping up a decade-long project that has identified, transcribed, and provided commentary on all book advertisements from English newsbooks and broadsides published before the first term catalogue. I hold a PhD, M.I., M.A., and an Hon. BA, and my work has been published in The Library, PBSA, and various other journals
Naomi Makowska (University of Toronto)
“Women’s Magic and Health in Early Modern Modena, Italy“
This project seeks to examine how non-elite women in early modern Modena, Italy, developed and practiced forms of everyday knowledge related to healing, protection, and the supernatural. It draws on Inquisition trial records alongside recipe books that contained healing remedies to examine how women navigated the intersections of healing practices and magical expertise in their daily lives.
Bernice Mittertreiner Neal (York University)
“Commanding Attention: Spectatorship, Iconoclasm, Antitheatre, and Stage Props in Arden of Faversham”
Characters in Arden of Faversham stand-in for the play’s spectators who are looking uncertainly at what antitheatricalists and iconoclasts will argue are dangerous objects. “Commanding Attention” examines how the decidedly un-domestic props in this domestic tragedy contribute to the play’s assertion of the power of objects, especially stage objects, to compel a dangerous pre-Reformation way of seeing from their beholders. This project lays its foundation for inquiry by considering the play’s theology in the context of dramatic theory and staging practice; and by tracing the stage lives of the play’s props alongside real-world representations of the things that construct Arden’s play-world, as found in books of emblems and iconography for example. It explores how the play offers itself as an antidote to Catholic imagery and its poisonous way of seeing divinity at the same as it undermines its protestant aesthetics by staging a miracle of salvation at the play’s end.
Senior Fellow
Joanna Miles (CRRS, University of Toronto)
“The Fortunes of Sin: The Seven Deadly Sins and Affect in Late Medieval and Early Modern Protestant England”
My project undertakes to trace the fortunes of the heptad after the Reformation. My main areas of focus include a review of ‘classic’ approaches to sin in early modern texts, with emphasis on the symbolism, traditional language, and associations of vices with other cultural tropes in view of pre-Reformation traditions; a study of alternative sin classifications and the emergence of vices as new introspective categories in Protestant piety; and additionally a review of sin in literary texts, particularly from the sixteenth-century.
Juan Antonio Prieto-Pablos (Universidad de Sevilla)
“Changeable Scenery in Restoration Drama (1660-1700)“
My research focuses on the use of scenery in Restoration theatres and on its representation of locale, a matter that is often cited as one of the most important developments in the history of English theatres but is seldom discussed in due detail. In order to better understand Restoration drama, it is crucial (in my opinion) to know not only what was acted but also how it was acted.
Dylan Reid (CRRS)
“David Ferrand and the use of dialect in the poetry of the Puy of the Immaculate Conception in Rouen”
At the annual poetry contest of Rouen’s Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception in the early seventeenth century, the printer David Ferrand created a tradition of writing and presenting poems in the local dialect. These poems, often either humorous or commenting on current affairs, claimed to reflect the talk and opinions of everyday inhabitants of the city, who were themselves among the audience at the annual event. I am looking at how Ferrand negotiated the use of dialect to both carve out a place for himself in Rouen’s poetic sphere, and articulate otherwise unheard voices while avoiding controversy.
Senior Fellow
Nathan Ron (University of Haifa)
“Wolfgang Capito (c. 1478 – 1541) and the Jews: A Comparative Perspective and a Dialogical Dimension.”
Capito’s ties with Erasmus, mainly through letters, were close and profound, but it seems that Capito did not share Erasmus’s anti-Jewish prejudices. According to my current research, Capito’s rhetoric concerning Jews and Judaism was more complex than Erasmus’s. Such complexity can be observed in the letter of recommendation (April 1537) that Capito wrote to Martin Luther on behalf of the Jewish leader Rabbi Joseph (Josel) of Rosheim (M. Luther, Werke, WA, Briefe VIII, no. 3152, pp. 77–78). Thus,my work examines Capito’s interactions with Jews, and especially his connections with Rabbi Joseph of Rosheim. The project, inter alia, requires an examination of Capito’s correspondence. Three volumes have so far appeared (Rummel, E. and M. Kooistra, The Correspondance of Wolfgang Capito. 3 volumes. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2005-2016), and I am collaborating with Erika Rummel and Milton Kooistra on the completion of Capito’s fourth volume of Correspondence.
Erika Rummel (Wilfrid Laurier University and University of Toronto)
“Guardians of tradition and morality: The Parlement of Paris under Francis I. A collection of source texts in translation “
This is an annotated translation of French texts selected from the 1200 court cases dealt with by the Parlement and edited by James Farge in his Religion, Reformation and Repression in the Reign of Francis I. This task is nearing completion and is now at the final revision stage. Next, I will collaborate with Jacquie Glomski (a former curator of CRRS) on an annotated edition and translation of two Latin tracts on the El Escorial Library by Juan Baptista Cardona (1587) and Claude Clement (1635).
Senior Fellow
Rachel F. Stapleton (CRRS Fellow)
“The Humanist Letters of Luisa Sigea (ca. 1522–1560)“
This project aims to complete English translations of the twenty-two extant Latin letters of the Spanish-Portuguese humanist, Luisa Sigea (ca. 1522–1560). Sigea’s Latin literary career spanned almost twenty years, and in addition to the surviving letters, includes a philosophical dialogue, Duarum virginum colloquium de vita aulica et privata, and a laudatory poem Syntra, dedicated to the Infanta María of Portugal. Sigea was internationally recognized during her lifetime, and extensively eulogized in the decades after her death. Yet she remains almost unknown to scholars working in English.
Goran Stanivukovic (Saint Mary’s University)
“The Romance and Wonder in the Age of Shakespeare“
My project explores the connections between late medieval romances – wonder stories written before the English Reformation – and the prose fiction and drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The intellectually vibrant texts and discourses of The Golden Legend infused early modern fictions with a renewed sense of wonder, and The Golden Legend became a model for conceptualizing fictions of improbability. Compiled in the 1260s by Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend was translated from French into English by William Caxton in 1483–84 and printed by Wynkyn de Worde in the 1490s. Several copies of these early printings are held in the CRRS collection. I focus on romance as a secular prose form that originated in the thirteenth century and examine fictions by Robert Greene, Philip Sidney, and the Amadis cycle, as well as plays by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Fletcher. In the book which I plan to come out of this research, I investigate the conceptualization of wonder as a narrative topos in fiction, encompassing storms, shipwrecks, tempestuous voyages through the Eastern Mediterranean, wanderings and errors, vows and oaths, magical boats and rings, giants, pilgrimages, Edenic fantasies, the Isles of the Blessed, the Fortunate Isles, fairy lands, instances of sexual violence, and folklore motifs such as cross-dressing. This mutable geography served as the medium through which late medieval wonder stories from The Golden Legend were reimagined in early modern prose romances and drama. The Golden Legend offers new scope for the study of romance because it treats wonder broadly and situates it within the imaginative geography of the Eastern Mediterranean, a region central to the literary mythos of the origins of Western Europe. My project argues that narratives of strangeness, estrangement, and improbability in early modern prose fiction and drama owe far more than has been recognized to the corresponding narrative ingenuity of The Golden Legend.
Elisa Tersigni (University of Toronto)
“Converting Cuisine: The Christianization of Jewish and Islamic Foods in Early Modern Europe.”
My project reads early modern recipe books as cultural contact zones in which racial, religious, and national identities confront one another.
Stella Wang (Emmanuel College)
“Religious Censorship and Cultural Memory in A Midsummer Night’s Dream“
My research examines Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the wake of the suppression of medieval mystery cycles and religious censorship in Reformation England. I argue that the play becomes a critical commentary on the complex cultural losses incurred by Protestant anti-theatrical polemics from the 1559 statutes through the pamphlet wars in the last decades of the century. Shakespeare offers a celebratory defense of both civic medieval drama and the professional Elizabethan theatre, as well as the dramatic imagination of their audiences. The project combines literary analysis, religious history, and performance culture of medieval and early modern theatre.
Lauren Weindling (Wilfrid Laurier University)
“The Siren Song of Romance“
This interdisciplinary project, co-authored with philosopher Michael Milona (TMU), examines the nature and ethical implications of romantic love. We maintain that to fully appreciate this ideology of romance requires historically sensitive literary and cultural analysis from the medieval period to today; this methodology highlights romance’s most pernicious elements as well as the extent to which it remains recalcitrant to revision. We hope this project will contribute to a growing conversation around expectations for our intimate relationships and how we may build meaningful emotional lives.
Senior Fellow
Deanne Williams (York University)
“Shakespeare and Diasporic Book History in Spain and Portugal”
Deanne Williams is Professor of English and Theatre Studies at York University. This year she is working on a collaborative project with John Stone of the University of Barcelona. Supported by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant, this project recovers pre-1900 English editions of Shakespeare and early modern drama in Spain and Portugal. Previous narratives of Shakespeare’s presence in Spain start with the translation, into Spanish, of French translations of Shakespeare in the nineteenth century. This project, which brings book history and Shakespeare studies together with World Literature, charts the rich history of Shakespeare’s readers in Spain and Portugal in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It had, as its starting point, Professor Stone’s discovery of a 1634 quarto of Shakespeare’s Two Noble Kinsmen in the Royal Scots College in Salamanca.
Senior Fellow
Jacqueline Wylde (SSHRC Postdoc Fellow, St. Francis Xavier University)
“Hearing the Metrical Psalms (1562-1665)”
Hearing the Metrical Psalms (1562-1665) investigates the interplay between the texts, sounds and cultural meanings of the congregationally sung English metrical psalms from the Elizabethan period through the Restoration. Combining sonic experimentations and live performance, textual and archival research, and digital modes of communicating sound-based research, Hearing the Metrical Psalms explores how the sound and cultural meanings of the sung psalms shifted over time and space.
Shaomin Zheng
“Colonialism, Ecology and East-West Relations”
My research project explores the intellectual and cultural exchanges between Europe and China during the early modern period, focusing on how translation and cultural adaptation shaped understandings of geography, nature, and science. Taking a cue from studies on colonial knowledge production, I examine Matteo Ricci’s Chinese writings to analyze how European and Chinese epistemologies intersected and transformed one another. By placing these works within the broader context of European expansion and representations of nature and science, I investigate how such exchanges reconfigured intellectual traditions on both sides, contributing to a global history of knowledge.
