Christopher Archibald

Thesis Title: English Catholic literary culture, 1640-1660

Supervisor: Peter Davidson & Paulina Kewes

Research Interests: post-reformation literature, history and politics; early modern Catholicism; book history and manuscript studies; Neo-Latin drama and poetry; the history of emotions; Anglo-European cultural relations; writings of travel and exile

Doctoral Research: My DPhil project examines the literary culture of English Catholics produced during the Civil Wars and Interregnum. This diverse and neglected literature includes history plays, verse miscellanies, conversion narratives, devotional poetry, travelogues, and prose romances. I consider how these texts engage with contemporary political upheaval and forge communal identities. Recent scholarship has emphasised the contingency and hybridity of mid-seventeeth-century allegiance; rather than simply adding another constituency to an increasingly diverse map of the period, my thesis seeks to rethink the contested relationship between literary form, political allegiance, and confessional identity in England’s revolutionary decades.

Publications:

‘Calculating History: A Mid-Seventeenth-Century Reader of Robert Persons’ A Conference about the Next Succession (1594/1595)’, The Review of English Studies 71.299 (April 2020): 272–291. https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgz043

‘Remembering the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Elizabethan England’, Studies in Philology 118.2 (Spring 2021), forthcoming.