Dr Ruth Ahnert, BA MPhil PhD (Cambridge)
email: r.r.ahnert@qmul.ac.ukPhone: +44 (0)20 7882 5836
Ruth Ahnert’s research interests lie at the intersection of religious history, literary form and book history in the late medieval and early modern periods. Her primary publications are on literature and texts associated with imprisonment, from writings produced in prison (including genres as diverse as poetry, theological tracts, and graffiti), to representations of incarceration on the early modern stage. She has recently completed her first monograph, The Rise of Prison Literature in the Sixteenth Century (under consideration), which charts innovations in English prison literature following the Reformation. She is currently collaborating with a networks scientist on Protestant letter networks in the reign of Mary I, using mathematical tools to examine their social and textual organization. She will be presenting initial findings at conferences in Spring 2012.
Along with Tamara Atkin (Queen Mary) and Francis Lenghan (Oxford), Ruth has established the Psalms Network, with participants in the UK, US, Europe and Australia. The aim of this network is to draw together academics, curators, and musicians to evaluate the role of Psalm translation in the development of English culture from the sixth century to the English Civil War. Planned activities include panel sessions at two conferences this summer, and a three-day conference in 2013. Further details will be posted here shortly.
Ruth is also co-editor of the Bulletin of the Society for Renaissance Studies with Joanna Craigwood (Cambridge).
Publications:
Articles and chapters:
‘Inscribed in Memory: The Prison Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt’, in Henry VIII and the Tudor Court, ed. Thomas Betteridge and Suzzanah Lipscomb (Ashgate, forthcoming in 2012).
‘Imitating Inquisition: Dialectical Bias in Protestant Prison Writings’, in Imagining Inquisition in England, 1215-1550, ed. Mary Flannery and Katie Walter, Westfield Medieval Studies (Boydell and Brewer, forthcoming in 2012)
‘Drama King: The Portrayal of Henry VIII in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons’, in Henry VIII in History, ed. Thomas Betteridge and Thomas S. Freeman (Ashgate, forthcoming in 2012).
‘William Marshall’, and ‘Robert Copland’, in Blackwell Encyclopaedia of English Renaissance Literature, ed. Alan Stewart, Garrett Sullivan, Rebecca Lemon, Nicholas’ McDowell, and Jennifer Richards (Blackwell-Wiley, forthcoming in 2012).
‘Writing in the Tower of London during the Reformation, ca. 1530-1558’, in Prison Writings in Early Modern Britain, ed. by William Sherman and William J. Sheils as a special issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly (June 2009), 168-92.
Scholarly introduction to John Frith’s A christen sentence and true iudgement of the moste honorable sacrament of Christes body [and] bloude (1548; STC 5190, 5190.3), Early English Books Online (EEBO).
‘Models of Winning in the B-text of Piers Plowman and Wynnere and Wastoure’, Marginalia 4 (2006).
‘Illuminating the Soul: Religious Enclosure and the Validation of Mystical Experience in The Life of Christina of Markyate and The Book of Margery Kempe’, Marginalia 3 (2006).
Reviews:
‘The King and the Codpiece’, review of Henry VIII and His Afterlives: Literature, Politics and Art, ed. Mark Rankin, Christopher Highley, and John N. King (Cambridge UP, 2009), The Cambridge Quarterly, 40:3 (2011), 271-7.
Review of Elaine V. Beilin (ed.), Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers, vol I, Early Tudor Writers (Ashgate, 2009) and Amy Greenstadt, Rape and the Rise of the Author: Gendering Intention in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2009), Gender and History 23:1 (2011), 187-9.
Review of Douglas Grey, Later Medieval English Literature (Oxford UP, 2008), Marginalia 8 (2008).
Review of Gordon McMullan and David Matthews (eds.), Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England (Cambridge UP, 2007), Marginalia 7 (2008).
Review of Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham (eds.), The Uses of Script and Print, 1300-1700 (Cambridge UP, 2004), Annotated Bibliography of English Studies.
Review of Mary Alexander Watt, The Cross that Dante Bears: Pilgrimage, Crusade, and the Cruciform Church in the Divine Comedy (Florida UP, 2005). Marginalia 3 (2006).