Research interests

My research interests include early modern English, technical writing, orality and literacy, translated texts, and religious discourse. Much of my scholarship combines these interests, from my master’s thesis on Alexander Pope’s commentary on Homer’s Iliad to my doctoral thesis on the Book of Common Prayer as technical writing for an oral-aural culture.

Literary scholars tend to dismiss technical writing as sub-literary and translation as unoriginal. Technical writing scholars tend to exclude religious writing and ignore orality, and have only recently begun to study texts before the eighteenth century. My own ongoing work seeks to address these gaps, which I believe reflect unexamined prejudices. The division between literary and technical writing would have befuddled the early modern mind. The informative and (aurally) delightful were understood to go hand-in-hand and translated texts were the fount of literary vitality. After all, Chaucer, whom Edmund Spenser, looked to as ‘the well of English vndefyled’ (Faerie Queene IV.ii.32), represents himself as translator rather than ‘auctour’. Canterbury Tales (much to the consternation of twentieth-century literary critics) unabashedly mixes translated material with more original works and bawdy entertainment with a treatise on repentance.

Presently, I am writing (with Dr Samuel Fornecker) a commentary on the Book of Common Prayer (1662) (under contract with IVP Academic). The influence of the Book of Common Prayer on English language, letters, and culture is only comparable to Shakespeare and the King James Bible. Although its liturgical scripts were publicly performed far more often than any of Shakespeare’s plays, the study of the Book of Common Prayer has largely been confined to clergy and theologians. These perspectives are valuable, but tend to leave rhetorical and usability features unexamined. As a result, the challenge of producing a single user-manual to facilitate implementation in every parish church, cathedral, and college chapel in England by clergy and laity who received no special training for that task remains unexamined. My co-author and I bring an interdisciplinary approach to the study of this critical text. Ours is the first commentary to take into account the liturgical manual’s rhetorical and usability features, and the insights of the revolution in the historiography of the Church of England of the past thirty years.

Following the publication of the commentary, I plan to work on a new edition of the works of John Boys (1571–1625), Dean of Canterbury, who published the first of several book-length studies of the reformed English liturgy (gathered into Boys’ Workes in 1622), but whose place in the literature on the English Prayer Book has been almost totally ignored until quite recently. It is generally thought that the earliest book-length Prayer Book commentaries are published in the Interregnum in response to the immediate need to defend the abolished liturgy of ‘the church of Elizabeth and James’, but Boys wrote thirty years before that and was the first writer to provide an account of the Prayer Book on its own terms, rather than as a response to its detractors. Patrick Collinson described Boys as “middlebrow,” making him an ideal voice for us to hear, more likely representative of the typical late-Elizabethan/Jacobean conformist than highbrow, elder contemporary Richard Hooker.

Boys reveals considerable, eclectic engagement with sources that sheds light on what “middlebrow” conformists were reading in the early Stuart period. The marginal references reveal that he was extremely well-read in contemporary continental Protestant — Calvin, Bucer, Bullinger, Martyr, Beza, Luther, and Melancthon — and Roman writers — Bellarmine, Cajetan, and Erasmus — as well as medieval — Bernard, Aquinas, Lombard, and Anselm — and patristic sources — particularly, Augustine, Jerome, Cyprian, Tertullian, Chrysostom, Basil, Gregory Nazianzus, and Eusebeus. Of his own countrymen, he most frequently cites William Perkins, William Fulke, and “that Oxenford of learning, Master Richard Hooker.” Indeed, Boys seems to be the first writer to make extensive use of Hooker in his own works.

Scholarly attention to Hooker’s Lawes has overshadowed Boys’ work on the liturgy, but Hooker’s work was not as influential in his own day as it would later become (though, paradoxically, Boys references the Lawes thus helping build Hooker’s reputation). His expositions generated great demand, going through several editions in quick succession, indicating that it met a need within the early Stuart period. A new edition of Boys’ Works would contribute significantly to our understanding of that period and its literature.

I welcome inquiries concerning research collaboration in these areas.