Rachel Willie

Matthew Prior’s diplomatic negotiations with France in the period 1711–15 were the most important and worst rewarded of his career. From 1711 the English career-diplomat and poet acted as secret negotiator for the Tory government with enemy France. His journeys and talks were part of wider negotiations that ultimately led to peace and the Treaty […]

A few months ago, I attended a symposium organized by my old friend Peter Miller, now Dean of the Bard Graduate Center in New York. It celebrated 20 years of that institution’s innovative programme on the history of decorative arts and material culture. The speakers included academics from various fields and curators from museums on

‘The Culture of Early Modern Sussex’, a HEIF-funded project, intends to challenge assumptions about the county, demonstrating both the strangeness of Sussex and its importance in the period 1500 – 1700.  Through a series of public events in the Spring and early Summer of 2015 – including two exhibitions, a number of public lectures, and

Extraordinarily, despite his ongoing popularity (tesitified by the amount of his work in the National Gallery’s own collection), there has never yet been a monographic show on Paolo Veronese in England. This is a striking omission that has been handsomely corrected in the National Gallery Exhibition, which ran from 19 March until 15 June 2014.

When I was invited to a Christmas party last year, I was requested to “dress smartly and don’t bring any cider!”. Yet, even without this warning, good manners  would have dictated that I leave the four-pack of Scrumpy Jack at the back of my fridge. For me, however, the incident also posed the question: why

Standing at a busy crossroads, at rush hour, I looked up at the towering magnificence of Genoa’s Medieval Porta Soprana. This  fleeting glimpse, before the traffic lights changed and the roar of the contemporary city struck up again, impressed me with a sense  of the power, protection and wealth of this Republic, dubbed ‘the Proud’.

One striking development in Renaissance studies over the last five years has been the surge of interest in the theory and practice of translation. This has been evident not just in the number of conferences and books on the subject, including the publication of volume 2 (1550-1660) in the admirable Oxford History of Literary Translation

The debate about Open Access (OA) over the last year has been quite fierce at times. Now things seem to be calming down.  But is this the calm before another storm? In this post I want to share my perspective as editor of Renaissance Studies and say a bit about how we have responded to

Of making many bookes there is no end, and much studie is a wearinesse of the flesh. (Ecclesiastes 12:12)   The availability of classical and renaissance texts online – whether out of copyright Loebs, the electronic ‘Renascence Editions’ or Early English Books Online – has changed the nature of reading and research. That there is no