How to do books with things in early modern England

Dr Jason Scott-Warren, Gonville & Caius

Jason studied English at Jesus College, Cambridge, and went on to become a graduate student and a Research Fellow there. From 1998-2004 he was a lecturer at the University of York and in 2004, appointed to a lectureship at Cambridge and a Fellowship of Gonville and Caius College. Jason did his PhD under the supervision of Warren Boutcher on books as gifts at the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts, and this formed the basis of his first book. Since then, he has written numerous studies of early modern literature in circulation, as well as broader accounts of the relationship between writing and cultural history. He is currently Director of the Cambridge Centre for Material Texts, an initiative aimed at bringing people from across the University together to talk about the embodied and embedded forms of the sources they study. He is also working on a new book about Shakespeare's first documented reader.

Selected Publications

• 'Nashe's Stuff', in Andrew Hadfield, ed., The Oxford Companion to English Prose, c. 1500-1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2013)
• 'Was Elizabeth I Richard II?: The Authenticity of Lambarde's "Conversation"', in Review of English Studies (2012)
• 'Reading on the Threshold', in Subha Mukherji, ed., Thinking on Thresholds: The Poetics of Transitive Spaces (London: Anthem Press, 2011), 57-72
• 'Unannotating Spenser', in Helen Smith and Louise Wilson, eds, Renaissance Paratexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 153-64, 250-4
• 'Books in the Bedchamber: Religion, Accounting and the Library of Richard Stonley', in John N. King, ed., Tudor Books and Readers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 232-52
• 'Reading Graffiti in the Early Modern Book', in Huntington Library Quarterly 73 (2010), 363-81
• Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005)
• Tudor Drama Before Shakespeare, multi-author essay collection co-edited with Lloyd Kermode and Martine van Elk (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005)
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, articles on John Harington of Stepney, Sir John Harington and Gabriel Harvey (2004)
• 'When Theaters Were Bear-Gardens; or, What's at Stake in the Comedy of Humors', Shakespeare Quarterly 54.1 (2003), 63-82
• 'Harington's Gossip', in Tom Freeman and Susan Doran, eds, The Myth of Elizabeth (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 221-41
• Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift, Oxford University Press (2001)
• 'News, Sociability and Bookbuying in Early Modern England: The Letters of Sir Thomas Cornwallis', The Library, 7th ser., 1 (2000), 377-98
• 'Reconstructing Manuscript Networks: The Textual Transactions of Sir Stephen Powle', in Alexandra Shepard and Philip Withington, eds, Communities in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 18-37
• 'Sir John Harington's Life of Ariosto and the Textual Economy of the Elizabethan Court', Reformation 3 (1998), 259-301