Tom Charlton, BA (Oxon), MPhil, PhD (Cantab)

AHRC funded Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Reliquiae Baxterianae Project

Tom Charlton is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Stirling, working on the Reliquiae Baxterianae Project. Working with the Baxter Treatises, Egerton MS 2,570 in the British Library, and the printed edition of 1696, Tom's principal responsibilities are to establish a reliable and accessible text for the Reliquiae, and to identify discrepancies between the manuscript and printed versions of the text.

His personal research interests concentrate on the literature of the early modern period, with a particular emphasis on texts engaged in the religious and political disputes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He has published on topics ranging from Elizabethan republicanism to Restoration responses to the concept of treason, and has contributed to a number of scholarly enterprises exploring the relationship between literature and politics in the Renaissance.

Having undertaken research and teaching at a number of universities, including Liverpool, Cambridge and Sheffield, Tom is presently completing work on two connected book-length projects, one on the pamphlet literature of Restoration radicalism and another which studies competing notions of obedience from the Reformation to the Restoration, incorporating many key areas of interest, including polemic, censorship, history of the book, reader response, and narratology. Provisionally entitled Doing Well: Polemic and Obedience in Early Modern England, it explores the relationship of 'obedience' to ideas of allegiance, duty and liberty throughout the period, by analysing the rhetorical representation and reception of such ideas, and crucially relating them to polemic – the ways in which these notions took shape in the cauldron of textual argument. Other topics on which he hopes to publish shortly include Assize sermons in the Restoration, Quaker trial narratives and their use by eighteenth-century historians, and Restoration responses to the regicides.

Select publications of particular relevance to the history of dissent:

' "Good advice and counsel": print and the 'vita activa' in Elizabethan Republicanism', in Gloriana's Rule: Literature, Religion and Power in the Age of Elizabeth, ed. R. Carvalho Homem and F. Vieira (Porto, 2006)

' "Tis the Thought of the Heart which makes the Treason": Restoration Responses to the Regicides', in Heroes and Villains: The Creation and Propagation of an Image, ed. C. George and J. Sutherland (Durham, 2004)

Digital Media Work includes 'Quakers in North-West England & the Politics of Space, 1652-1653', an electronic parallel-text edition of the three versions of George Fox's Journal for the years 1652-1653

'Religion and Rebellion', transcriptions of volumes 30-61 of the Carte Calendar, Bodleian Library