Projects

Find out more about our current projects

  • The Chaucer Encyclopedia

    Dr Katie Walter is a co-editor of The Chaucer Encyclopedia, an international, multi-authored project to create a comprehensive directory of Chaucer’s life and works.

  • Histories of the Body, Prosthesis, and the Senses

    The Centre has fostered new and pathbreaking research in medieval and Renaissance histories of the body, with, for example, an event on ‘Modified Bodies and Prosthesis’ in 2014 and the publication of a special issue for Textual Practice on ‘Prosthesis in Medieval and Early Modern Culture’ in 2016 (edited by Chloe Porter, Katie Walter and Margaret Healy, published in an expanded version by Routledge in 2018).  

    Dr Katie Walter is a member of two international, cross-disciplinary and cross-period networks, the History of the Senses and the Cultures of Skin, and has published widely on the medieval body, prosthesis and the senses of taste and touch, and is currently working on a project on feet in the medieval period.

    Dr Chloe Porter has published widely on bodies in early modern drama, with a particular interest in vision, the materiality of the body, and non-human bodies. She is currently writing about stories of creation and corporeality for a monograph on beginnings in early modern plays.

  • Islam and the Medieval and Early Modern Western World

    CEMMS has a long-standing and active ongoing research interest in the interactions between the Islamic and Western worlds in the medieval and early modern periods, with a particular emphasis on the ways in which Islam was enacted and embodied on the early English stage.

    In collaboration with Shakespeare’s Globe, the Read Not Dead project, and Red Dragonfly Theatre Productions, the Centre has staged a number of performances, workshops and readings of early modern ‘Turk plays’ which underline the early modern English fascination with Islam.

    Professor Mat Dimmock is the internationally renowned author of several notable books on the subject. Continuing postgraduate research in this area continues to investigate early modern east-west interactions and their literary and diplomatic consequences.

  • The Thomas Nashe Project

    The Thomas Nashe Project, on which Andrew Hadfield is a co-investigator, is an ambitious project of scholarly editing, contracted by Oxford University Press: 6 volumes of all of Nashe's known writings, as well as dubia, with detailed annotation that takes account of advances in our understanding of the sixteenth century over the last 30 years; a new glossary that makes use of e-search tools; and extensive analysis and commentary.

    In addition to the new edition The Thomas Nashe Project has held numerous events, including  performances, public readings, and academic conferences.

    The edition will consist of six substantial volumes:

    • Vol. 1: Introduction and textual notes. The Anatomie of Absurditie (1589); Preface to Menaphon (1589); Preface to Astrophil & Stella (1591); Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Devil (1592)
    • Vol. 2: Strange Newes (1592); Christ's teares over Jerusalem (1593); The Terrors of the Night (1593); Dido, Queen of Carthage (1594)
    • Vol. 3: The Unfortunate Traveller (1594); The Choice of Valentines and other verse (nd); Letter to William Cotton (1596)
    • Vol. 4: Have With You to Saffron-Walden (1596); Nashe's Lenten Stuffe (1599); Summer's Last Will and Testament (1600)
    • Vol. 5: Dubia, the Anti-Martinist Works: Countercuffe (1589); Mar-Martine (1589), Martin's Month's Minde (1589); Returne of Pasquill (1589); Almond for a Parrat (1590); Pasquil's Apologie (1590)
    • Vol. 6: Commentary; glossary of Nashe neologisms; Index 

    Partners in the project are the University of Sheffield, the University of Newcastle, and the Norfolk Museum and Archaeology Service

    Find out more

  • “This is a womans minde”: The Life, Work and Political Rhetoric of Anne Dowriche

    Thirty years into the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, a small book appeared in the London market. The frontispiece identified it as ‘The French Historie’ and noted that it was ‘published by A. D.’. Only when the reader perused the dedication in the first pages of the book did it become clear that ‘A. D.’ was in fact ‘Anne Dowriche’; they were reading one of the few sixteenth century books written entirely by a woman.

    This project will go beyond previous work by appreciating The French Historie in the broader contexts of English domestic and international politics and the revival of neo-classical humanist rhetoric. This project sees Dowriche’s gender as only one aspect of her literary identity; it asks questions about how Dowriche, marginalized but not selfconsciously defined by her gender in 16th-century society, sought to speak truth to power and engage politically through her writing. This project will expand an understanding of Dowriche’s life, work and influence through archival research, textual and contextual analysis and scholarly exchange and dialogue. In so doing, this project will make contributions to a variety of scholarly inquiries, including into the character of political culture in Elizabethan England, the role of women’s writing in shaping this political culture, the nature of women’s political engagement and agency, and the interaction between writing, rhetoric and political commentary. It will also reconstruct Dowriche as a significant literary and political figure by placing her within her context and in a network with other thinkers and writers of the age.

  • Premodern Critical Race Studies

    The Centre has a regular reading group focusing on Premodern Critical Race Studies, and has arranged events exploring the pedagogies of, and research into, this area. Professor Andrew Hadfield and Professor Matthew Dimmock have recently contributed chapters to the Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race (2021). Questions of race and coloniality feature prominently in premodern teaching at Sussex.

  • William Baldwin and the Beware the Cat Project

    In the mid-sixteenth century, William Baldwin created the first printed English sonnet, the first English novel, the first epistolary novel, and a host of poetic and philosophical writings that were devoured by the Tudors and inspired the leading lights of Elizabethan literature including William Shakespeare, and Edmund Spenser. Yet his texts are inaccessible to the public and several have never been edited. Dr Rachel Stenner is editing the Collected Literary Works of William Baldwin with Professor Scott Lucas, of The Citadel. This work is funded by a British Academy / Leverhulme Trust Small Research Grant and is contracted to Boydell & Brewer. Dr Stenner’s editorial work on Baldwin builds on previous creative and theatrical work on this author. In collaboration with colleagues from the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, she has adapted Baldwin’s novel, Beware the Cat, for performance. This little-known satire about speaking felines has been toured around the country and the adaptation will be published in a special edition of Textual Practice that Dr Stenner is currently co-editing.