Member Publications

Susan Broomhall, Women and Religion in Sixteenth-Century France. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

This work considers how Frenchwomen participated in Christian religious practice during the sixteenth century, with their words and their actions. Using extensive original and archival sources, it provides a comprehensive study of how women contributed to institutional, theological, devotional and political religious matters. Challenging the view of religious reforms and ideas imposed by male authorities upon women, this study argues instead that women, Catholic and Calvinist, lay and monastic, were deeply involved in the culture, meanings and development of contemporary religious practices.

R. S. White, Natural Rights and the Birth of Romanticism in the 1790s. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Following the American War of Independence and the French Revolution, ideas of the 'Natural Rights of Man' (later distinguished into particular issues like rights of association, rights of women, slaves, children and animals) were publicly debated in England. Literary figures like Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Thelwall, Blake and Wordsworth reflected these struggles in their poetry and fiction. With the seminal influences of John Locke and Rousseau, these and many other writers laid for high Romantic Literature foundations that were not so much aesthetic as moral and political. This new study by R.S. White provides a reinterpretation of the Enlightenment as it is currently understood.

Patricia Crawford, Blood, Bodies and Families in Early Modern England. New York: Longman, 2004.

This collection of essays contains a wealth of information on the nature of the family in the early modern period. This is a core topic within economic and social history courses which is taught at most universities. The book gives readers an overview of how feminist historians have been interpreting the history of the family, ever since Laurence Stone's seminal work Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 was published in 1977.

Anne M. Scott, Piers Plowman and the Poor. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004.

This book will be of interest to scholars in the field of medieval literature in general, and Piers Plowman in particular, as well as to cultural historians of poverty. It surveys the medieval understanding of poverty in its many manifestations, reviews modern historians' research into the experience of poverty and poor relief in the late fourteenth century, and shows, by close readings of Piers Plowman, how Langland both responds to and reflects his contemporary culture and ideology. Contrary to previous scholarship, it suggests that Langland never underestimates the realities of material poverty by offering only religious consolation for the poor.

Susan Broomhall, Women's Medical Work in Early Modern France. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004.

In this study, Susan Broomhall situates the practices and perceptions of women's medical work in France in the context of the sixteenth century and its medical evolution and innovations. She argues that early modern understandings of medical practice and authority were highly flexible and subject to change. Focusing on female practitioners, who cut across most sectors of early modern medical practice, this study reveals the multifaceted phenomenon of these negotiations for authority.

Claire E. McIlroy, The English Prose Treatises of Richard Rolle. Rochester: D.S. Brewer, 2004.

Richard Rolle, the `hermit of Hampole', wrote an extensive body of religious literature that was widely disseminated in late medieval England; but although many of his works have received substantial editorial attention, they have as yet attracted only limited detailed critical analysis, with scholarship largely focused on establishing facts about his life and striking character. This study aims to correct this imbalance by re-examining his English prose works - Ego Dormio, The Commandment and The Form of Living - in terms of their literary form, content and appeal rather than their relationship to Rolle's biography.

Yasmin Haskell, Loyola's Bees: Ideology and Industry in Jesuit Latin Didactic Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Loyola's Bees is the first full-length study of the Latin didactic poetry of the Society of Jesus, a Catholic Reformation order whose priests were the leading exponents of the genre in the early modern period. If post-Romantic readers have, in the main, lost the taste for a 'poetry of things', the poems in this book will command scholarly attention at least for what they reveal about early modern social, cultural, and intellectual life, Jesuit attitudes to the New World and the New Science, and the circulation of Latin literature in France and Italy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Susan Broomhall, Women and the Book Trade in Sixteenth-Century France. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002.

Focusing on the vastly understudied area of how women participated in the book trades, not just as authors, but also as patrons, copyists, illuminators, publishers, editors and readers, Broomhall's study foregrounds contributions made by women during a period of profound transformation in the modes and understanding of publication. Women and the Book Trade in Sixteenth-Century France constitutes the most comprehensive assessment of women's contribution to contemporary publishing yet available.

Pamela Sharpe, Population and Society in an East Devon Parish: Reproducing Colyton 1540-1840. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002.

Sharpe's study is a vivid and refreshing consideration of everyday life in a town visited by plague, Civil War, religious radicalism and industrial changes. What really happened in the place once described as ‘the most rebellious town in Devon’? The town of Colyton in Devon has been intensively analysed by historians interested in population trends, but this book combines demographic information with extensive details of the economy, society and local politics of the parish and region. This finely-grained, micro-history stresses the diversity of local experience and exposes many facets of the lives of ordinary individuals during the period.

The Tempest (New Casebooks), edited by R. S. White. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.

This selection of essays on Shakespeare's The Tempest gives examples from cultural studies, feminism, psychological criticism, political readings, new historicism, postcolonialism, new geography and other approaches. The book will give students an understanding of the bases of contemporary criticism, and it will give insights into Shakespeare's text from a rich variety of perspectives.
 
R. S. White is also the editor of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (2001) and Twelfth Night (1996), also for the New Casbooks series.

Andrew Marvell, Pastoral and Lyric Poems, 1681, edited by David Ormerod and Christopher Wortham. Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 2000.

Lucid, witty and elegant, this edition of Marvell's infamous 1681 Folio is accessible to readers from upper secondary to academia. Detailed notes locate Marvell within the context of time.

Toby Burrows, The Text in the Machine: Electronic Texts in the Humanities. New York: Haworth Press, 1999.

The first comprehensive guide to explore the growing field of electronic information, The Text in the Machine will help you create and use electronic texts. This book explains the processes involved in developing computerized books on library Web sites, CD-ROMs, or your own Web site. With the information provided by The Text in the Machine, you'll be able to successfully transfer written words to a digitized form and increase access to any kind of information. Keeping the perspectives of scholars, students, librarians, users, and publishers in mind, this book outlines the necessary steps for electronic conversion in a comprehensive manner.

Shakespeare: Readers, Audiences, Players, edited by Charles Edelman, Christopher Wortham, and R. S. White. Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1998.

This volume presents an edited selection of papers first delivered at the third symposium of the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association (ANZSA), held at UWA in 1994.
 
Included are papers by Derek Cohen, Jonathan Bate, R. S. White, Charles Edelman, Lloyd Davis, Christopher Wortham, Penny Gay, Juliet Dunsinberre, Ann Blake, David Ormerod, Kuniyoshi Munakata, Ron Bedford, and Richard Madelaine.

Andrew Lynch, Malory's Book of Arms: The Narrative of Combat in Le Morte Darthur. Rochester: D. S. Brewer, 1997.

This study of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur centres on its main narrative interest and expressive medium, armed combat. In the analysis of the discourse of fighting, some repeated descriptive preoccupations -to do with name, vision, blood, emotion and gesture - are examined as `needs of meaning' with relevance for the whole text, and related to political, religious, genealogical, sexual and medical views of Malory's period.

R. S. White, Natural Law in English Renaissance Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Natural Law, whether grounded in human reason or divine edict, encourages men to follow virtue and shun vice. The concept dominated Renaissance thought, where its literary equivalent, poetic justice, underpinned much of the period’s creative writing. R. S. White’s study examines a wide range of Renaissance texts, by More, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare and Milton, in the light of these developing ideas of Natural Law.

Venus & Mars: Engendering Love and War in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Andrew Lynch and Philippa Maddern. Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1995.

Includes essays by Patricia Crawford, Mary Dove, Clare Everett, Pina Ford, Lee Jones, Andrew Lynch, Philippa Maddern, Judith Maitland, Jennifer Smith, Stephanie Tarbin, and Charles Zika.