In this interview with authors from the Society for Renaissance Studies book series, we talk to Edward Holberton about his forthcoming book Atlantic Circulations: Literature, Reception and Imperial Identities, 1650-1750, contemporary adaptations of early modern texts, and the instabilities of an unfolding British imperial identity in this period.
1. What drew you towards Renaissance and Early Modern studies?
I think some of my interest in the early modern came from my parents, who took me to art exhibitions, including a lot of Renaissance and Baroque art. I also had a terrific A-level teacher, who transmitted to me a love for John Donne’s poetry. My undergraduate English degree gave me some nice opportunities to develop this interest in the metaphysical poets, particularly Andrew Marvell.
2. Apart from your own, what book would you recommend for people to read to learn more about your field of study?
It’s hard to choose, because the book’s trying to bring together English and History, and different area studies too (seventeenth-century English Literature and early American literature). John Kerrigan’s Archipelagic English shows new ways of thinking about the relationships between literary texts and the early modern ‘British problem’ – but it’s a British problem which extends to the Dutch. It was published fifteen years ago, but now seems very prescient in relation to what’s been happening in British politics since. Eve Tavor Bannet and Susan Manning’s Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1660–1830, which looks at how different literary genres travelled the Atlantic in the long eighteenth century is a very stimulating collection and shows the scope of the field. In historical studies, Jonathan Scott’s How the Old World Ended: The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution I found a very thought-provoking global history of the early modern Atlantic world.
3. What are the key facts or arguments from your book that you would like people to take away?
It’s a book about the transmission and reception of literary texts around the British Atlantic world during a key phase of imperial expansion: 1650-1750. I argue that these processes of textual transmission and reinterpretation allowed Atlantic world readers to reflect on the cultural continuities and differences that were shaping the English or British empire. As a result, the readings and new texts created through these processes can open up insights into the instabilities of an unfolding British imperial identity, particularly contests over the different forms, models and even centres that the empire adopted as it expanded and encountered other nations and peoples. One of the reasons why these questions became literary discussions is because the period of colonial expansion between 1650-1750 inherited a series of unresolved questions from the Civil War period: how sovereignty might be shared between the three kingdoms; how the relationship between empire and Protestantism might be organised.
4. How did your scholarly journey develop over the course of your research for this book? Did you end up where you always intended to?
The scope of the project was potentially so vast that I wanted from the outset to adopt a case study approach, and to try to balance my case studies in time and space to see how key imperial crises looked from different perspectives. But the case study approach often showed me that in the texts that I was looking at, bigger imperial crises became complexly involved with more local problems too which I needed to understand, such as the legal controversies which prompted William Trail’s migration to the Maryland, or the issues behind debates in The Barbados Gazette.
5. What were the most fruitful sources you found in your research?
Throughout the research for the book, I was looking for sources that could illuminate the transatlantic reception of texts, anything from annotations to literary adaptations. About a third of the way through this research, I stumbled across an extraordinary survival: William Trail’s miscellany, which had only very recently been accessioned by The National Library of Scotland. This manuscript itself travelled back and forth across the Atlantic, and it witnesses, and its annotations comment on, the transatlantic circulation of satire and news around the time of the Glorious Revolution. The miscellany quickly became very important to my understanding of how colonial actors thought about their place in the Atlantic world, and the focus of an early chapter in the book.
6. What was the biggest obstacle to conducting your research?
Covid. The book was about 4/5ths drafted when the pandemic struck, but then online teaching and caring responsibilities had to take over for a while. I was relatively fortunate though, in that most of the archival research had been done by that stage, so I wasn’t as interrupted as some researchers were.
7. Did you discover anything that made you rethink some of your initial ideas?
Yes, all the time! In fact you could say that the approach taken in the book targets this kind of rethinking, because I’m looking for the way that texts were interpreted in relation to devolved perspectives and contexts. An author such as Edward Taylor is reading a familiar text (Herbert’s The Temple) in a very unfamiliar way, and understanding that process from his perspective often involves standing on its head a lot of what I had previously understood about the literary texts I was looking at.
8. Was there anything that you were unable to include in the book?
I’ve got a virtual desk drawer full of offcuts, paused ideas and archival ‘finds’ for another day. William Byrd II of Virginia and Richard Ligon are interesting colonial figures that I would like to revisit at some point, and think about as both readers and writers. I’d like to investigate the ways in which Ligon’s True and Exact History of Barbados was read and used by seventeenth and eighteenth century readers. My chapter on The Barbados Gazette focuses on poems published in that periodical by Martha Fowke Sansom, but The Barbados Gazette includes lots of other material that would be of interest to scholars working on the literary and dramatic culture of the eighteenth-century Caribbean.
9. Do you have a favourite discovery or favourite fact from your research?
It’s quite an archival book, so a few things jumped out of the archives to make me rethink the way I should read connected texts: discovering the importance of the spawning fish at the heart of Anne Bradstreet’s ‘Contemplations’, for example: the spawning grounds, it turns out, were at the heart of a deal between the Bradstreets and the Pennacook people from whom they bought the land for the village of Andover.
10. What are the most significant influences on your scholarship?
Transatlantic literary studies has been a very dynamic field during the period in which I was writing the book, but part of the initial impulse for the project was provided by the work that Susan Manning had been doing on Scottish writing in transatlantic contexts (e.g. her Fragments of Union), and some collections she edited which scoped out the field and tried out relevant theoretical ideas.
11. What are you working on now?
The focus on reception in Atlantic Circulations led to me getting interested in libraries and changes in social book use around literary texts in the later seventeenth century. I’ve got a couple of essays underway about this topic, so I might see where this research leads. I’m also helping to organise the SRS conference in Bristol for July 2025, and we’ve got a really great programme, so I’m looking forward to seeing what might emerge from conversations there.
12. If you were not early modernists, is there any other period or history or historical field you would like to work on?
Well this book stretches into the eighteenth century, so that’s definitely an interest. Contemporary poetry has always been an interest too, and in my teaching I greatly enjoy discussing contemporary adaptations of early modern texts, so I’d love to think about those in research too at some point.
13. If you could instantly acquire one skill or ability to help your research, what would it be?
Languages: particularly fluent Latin and Dutch! One of my favourite recent books is Victoria Moul’s A Literary History of Latin and English Poetry: Bilingual Verse Culture in Early Modern England, because it shows how early modern poetry in English looks completely different from a bilingual perspective.
14. Is there any advice you would give to PhD students or early career researchers for finding their feet or developing their work in your field?
I’m very aware that humanities teaching and research is now a different world to the one that I faced in early career, even though that wasn’t so many years ago. That said, I think it’s as important as ever to seek out mentors from both within and without your research specialism. I was fortunate in working closely with colleagues in English who saw the development of the subject from different perspectives, and sometimes that’s been really helpful in figuring out my own identity and trajectory as a researcher: seeing how my work appears through not only specialist but non- specialist eyes.
Edward Holberton is Associate Professor of Early Modern English Literature at the University of Bristol, UK. His previous publications include Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate: Culture, Politics, and Institutions (2009) and, as co-editor (with Martin Dzelzainis), The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell (2019).
His book Atlantic Circulations: Literature, Reception and Imperial Identities, 1650-1750 will be published in April 2025: https://www.routledge.com/Atlantic-Circulations-Literature-Reception-and-Imperial-Identities-1650-1750/Holberton/p/book/9781032704203