School of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations

Office Hours

Tuesday 10.00-11.00am (Trimester 2, 2012)

Qualifications

MA PhD Camb

Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS)

Research Areas

  • Reformation and Renaissance history, with particular reference to religious history
  • history of science, magic and witchcraft before 1800
  • maritime history and the history of exploration and geography.

Current Research

  • An edition of William Harrison's Description of Britain, first published in Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577 and 1587), for the International Holinshed Project, Oxford University.
  • Shakespeare and Catholicism in Elizabethan Context’, a study of the historical context of Shakespeare’s religious development, using archival sources to critically examine the claim that Shakespeare was a convert to Counter-Reformation Catholicism. MS to be completed June 2012, book proposal in preparation.
  • ‘Richard Young and the Government of Elizabethan England’, biography of a Customs Officer, Money-lender, Speculator and Magistrate who became security chief and torturer to the Elizabethan Regime. MS to be completed 2013

Recent Publications

Books

Chapters

  • ‘John Dee (1527-1609)’, in Christopher Partridge, ed., The Occult World (4,000 words, Routledge, forthcoming 2014).
  • ‘Shakespeare and Catholicism in the Elizabethan Context’, in Malcolm Smuts, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare (8,000 words, OUP, forthcoming 2014).
  • 'William Harrison's 'Chronology' and Descriptions of Britain: Manuscript into Print', in Ian Archer, Felicity Heal and Paulina Kewes (eds.) The Oxford Handbook to Holinshed's Chronicles (8,000 words, OUP, forthcoming June 2012).
  • ‘Mythologies of Empire and the earliest English diasporas’, in T. Bueltmann, D. T. Gleeson and D. M. MacRaild, (eds.) Locating the English Diaspora 1500-2010 (8,000 words, Liverpool UP, forthcoming May 2012).
  • ‘Conceptions of the East in Medieval and Early Modern Europe', in A. Maxwell (ed.), The East-West Discourse and Symbolic Geography (Oxford and Bern, 2010), pp. 33-50.
  • ‘John Foxe and Edmund Plowden’, in D.M. Loades (ed.), The Acts and Monuments; an investigation into the contemporary significance of John Foxe’s book (St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History, 1997), pp. 295-305.
  • ‘Elect Church or Elect Nation ? The Reception of the Acts and Monuments’, in D. M. Loades (ed), John Foxe. An Historical Perspective (Aldershot, 1999), pp. 167-181.

Articles in Refereed Journals

  • 'Foreign Policy and the Parliament of 1576', Parliamentary History (9,000 words, forthcoming, 2012).
  • 'Magic, Mary Queen of Scots and the British Succession Crisis', Reformation. The Journal of the Tyndale Society (6,000 words, forthcoming, 2012).
  • ‘Occult Philosophy and Politics: Why John Dee wrote his ‘Compendious Rehearsal’ in November 1592’, in The Intellectual World of John Dee: Special Issue of Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science A (8,000 words, forthcoming online December 2011, in print February 2012).
  • 'New Evidence on William Shakeshafte, and Edmund Campion', Shakespeare Yearbook, n.s., 19 (2009), pp. 1-30.
  • 'English Magicians and the Crown of Poland: John Dee, Edward Kelly and Albrecht Łaski, 1583-1585', New Zealand Slavonic Journal, 42 (2008), pp. 79 - 100.
  • 'John Shakespeare's "recusancy" re-examined', Shakespeare Yearbook, n.s., 18 (2007), pp. 1-31.
  • 'John Dee and the Elizabethan 'British Empire' in its European Context', The Historical Journal 49, 3, 2006), pp. 643-675.
  • ‘William Harrison (1535-1593)’, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)
  • ’Sir John Woolley (d. 1593)’, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)
  • ‘Berosus and the Protestants: Reconstructing Protestant Myth’ The Huntington Library Quarterly, 64 (1-2) (2001), pp. 1-21.
  • ‘The Creation and Recreation of Puritanism’, Parergon, Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Festschrift for Patrick Collinson, N.S., Vol. 14, No. 1, July 1996, pp. 31-56.
  • ‘William Harrison (1535-1593)’, The Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 136, Sixteenth-century British Nondramatic Writers, Second series (1994), pp. 201-5.
  • ‘Inventing the “Good Duke” of Somerset’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 40, No. 3, July 1989, pp. 370-379.
  • ‘Trinity College Dublin MS 165: The study of time in the Sixteenth Century’, Historical Research, The Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, Vol. 62, No. 147, February 1989, pp. 15-33.
  • ‘Some Early Reactions to the Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher: the conflict between Humanists and Protestants’, Parergon, Bulletin of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Festschrift for Sir Geoffrey Elton, 1988, pp. 149-162.
  • ‘John Stow’s Unpublished “Historie of this Iland”: amity and enmity amongst sixteenth-century scholars’, The English Historical Review, Vol. CII, No. 404, July 1987, pp. 633-647.
  • ‘William Harrison and the Two Churches in Elizabethan Puritan Thinking’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 36, No. 3, July 1985, pp. 370-393.
  • ‘Puritanism, Science and Capitalism: William Harrison and the Rejection of Hermes Trismegistus’, History of Science, xxii (1984), pp. 245-270.
  • ‘William Harrison and Holinshed’s Chronicles’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 27, No. 4 (1984), pp. 789-810.