I am interested broadly in the literature and culture of England and continental Europe since the Renaissance, with a special focus on problems of interpretation in poetry, rhetoric, philosophy, medicine, theology and historiography. Much of my work explores the history and complexities of the category of the 'literary' itself as it intersects with other areas; for instance, in the last few years I've written articles on the Longinian sublime in early modern biblical criticism, the fashioning of dramatic character in Latin humanist accounts of a Tunisian monarch, and the aesthetics of Sir John Davies's philosophical poem Nosce Teipsum.
The culmination of these interests to date is a long monograph, A History of Ambiguity, due out in May 2019. This book is an account of the ways in which Western (and some non-Western) readers from Aristotle to William Empson have posited, denied, conceptualised and argued over the existence of multiple meanings in a wide variety of texts - poetry, drama, Scripture, law, and other genres. Among other contributions to the history of criticism, I reveal the tensions in the Renaissance theory of the pun; offer a new interpretation of the English controversy over 'equivocation' in 1606-10; read Alexander Pope (and his own contemporary readers) against early modern analyses of ambiguity in classical satire; provide the first detailed account of the invention and early elaboration (in Germany and England) of dramatic irony as a critical concept; and demonstrate the multiple genealogies of Empson's notion of ambiguity. As the archaeology of an idea central to modern criticism, the book aims to combine literary, historical and philosophical modes of scholarship.
Following a successful conference at Cambridge in 2017, I am currently editing a volume of essays on John Taylor the Water Poet (1578-1653), a prolific but understudied pamphleteer, travel-writer, nonsense poet, polemicist and literary celebrity; this project may also give rise to a monograph and/or critical edition at a later date.
