Professor Lorna Hutson

Teaching

With Professor Joe Moshenska I have convened the MSt in English, 1550-1700 and teach the core course, ‘Critical Questions in Early Modern Literature’; I give lectures on modern sexualities and Renaissance texts (‘Erotics of Argument’); I teach a special topic, ‘Making Belief on the Early Modern Stage’, and also with Professor Moshenska, I have taught a seminar on ‘Critical Race Studies and Early Modern Literature’. My PhD and DPhil students have worked, among other things, on lawmaking violence; women’s friendship; Ben Jonson; atheism; clandestine marriage; women’s poetry and alchemy; Edmund Plowden’s ‘King’s Two Bodies’; the law of rape and the literature of complaint. 

Career and Research

I was educated in San Francisco, Edinburgh and Oxford, and have revisited this itinerary in my recent career, having taught at Berkeley, St Andrews and now at Oxford. I work on early modern English literature and am broadly interested in the interrelations of literary form and other forms of cultural practice. In my earlier work (Thomas Nashe in Context; The Usurer’s Daughter) I was interested in literature’s relation to early modern economics, the household and usury. More recently, I have focused on the shared conceptual ground between the vividness of fiction (enargeia or evidentia) and the idea of legal evidence. A Guggenheim Fellowship helped me write The Invention of Suspicion, which won the Roland Bainton Prize (2008), while Circumstantial Shakespeare came from being asked to give the Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures in 2012. Finally, The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700 won the Bainton Reference Prize in 2018. A Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship on the imagining of England and Scotland pre 1603 enabled me to work on my most recent book, England’s Insular Imagining, which explores the shaping of geopolitics by literary fiction. My book, which has been reviewed in the Scotsman and the TLS, and longlisted for the Saltire Literary Awards*, shows how literature contributed decisively to the myth of England’s indifference to the conquest of Scotland and the related, surreal image of England as a sovereign island nation.

I am a Fellow of the British Academy through which I work to support humanities research in Britain. I am also Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies at Oxford and am on the editorial board of an exciting monograph series, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture.