Research interests

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

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). His 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. 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 cleric than his highbrow, elder contemporary Richard Hooker.

I welcome inquiries concerning research collaboration in these areas.