Dr Warren Boutcher, MA PhD (Cambridge)
Reader
Tel: +44 (0)20 7882 8540
email: w.v.boutcher@qmul.ac.uk
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Current projects
I am completing a monograph entitled The School of Montaigne: Enfranchising the early modern reader. This book presents interdisciplinary case-studies in the history of the Essais in different places and times (mainly France, England, Italy, Low Countries, USA in the periods 1580-1680 and 1900-1980), and applies Alfred Gell’s theory of art and agency to literature. Anyone with interests in this general area of early modern intellectual history might want to join the Facebook group ‘Late humanism’.
Renaissance in America: The reinvention of humanism in the age of Kristeller and Trilling is a project of case-studies in the history of the twentieth-century humanities, using the examples of two prominent Columbia University intellectuals. I have published a shorter (publisher’s online catalogue) and a longer version (available as a separate e-book from Deisel eBooks) of a study of Kristeller.
The Last Duke of Urbino’s Library: A historical Prospero and his books is a project in the vibrant field of the history of libraries. Everyone knows or recognises Federico da Montefeltro, who assembled a famous collection of manuscripts in the later fifteenth century. But the last Duke, Francesco Maria II della Rovere, who died in 1631, revived and dramatically expanded Urbino’s collections, founding a new library of printed books. The story of his books, manuscripts and archives – most of which survive – is one which bridges intellectual, social, cultural and political history. See vol. 3 of I Della Rovere nell’Italia delle Corti (2002) and my review of Franco Piperno’s magisterial book on Guidubaldo II (available on Blackwell Synergy).
I am preparing to return in the longer term to the general field of my doctoral thesis (on Florio’s Montaigne) and early publications: translation and late humanism. Early modern European translations have been cornered too much by specialists in translation studies. They are rich sources for general intellectual and cultural history. For overviews see my chapters in Reassessing Tudor Humanism (2002) and in The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation (2000).
Research interests:
As an undergraduate and graduate student of English literature, I used to sneak into seminars on anthropology, history, classics. My doctoral research concerned an Italian language-teacher (John Florio) who translated a French philosopher (Montaigne) into English with the help of an English physician and a Genevan theologian. At Queen Mary, I joined a department of English that hires classicists, sociologists, art historians. As a supervisor of doctoral research I have worked with a Mexican linguist on an English metaphysical poet, with a Central Europe specialist on Austrian émigrés to Britain, with a Tudor drama specialist on the gendered history of suicide, with a student of English modernist literature on the political culture of modern Venice.
These interdisciplinary and intercultural experiences have shaped my research on early modern and modern texts. I work on topics that variously bridge English, French, Italian, neo-Latin, Spanish and Dutch studies (the last two not as much as I would like); literature, translation, philosophy, historiography; books, manuscripts, archives; ideas, things, society, culture. The outcome is most usually a case-study of 15,000 to 20,000 words published in a book or journal. For overviews see ‘The Analysis of Culture Revisited’ in Journal of the History of Ideas, 64 (2003) and my chapter on ‘Literature’ in Palgrave Advances in Renaissance Historiography (2005). For a book-length interdisciplinary study of Montaigne wait for The School of Montaigne (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2009).
Publications:
(Full biography)
(a) Chapters in books
‘Afterword: Transferring Utopia’, in Transferring Utopia in Early Modern Europe: The Vernacular Paratexts, ed. Terence Cave (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming 2008)
‘"Le pauvre patient": Montaigne agent dans l’économie du savoir’ in Montaigne Politique, ed. Philippe Desan (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2006), 243-61
‘The Making of the Humane Philosopher: Paul Oskar Kristeller and Twentieth-Century Intellectual History’, in Kristeller Reconsidered: Essays on his Life and Scholarship, ed. John Monfasani (New York: Italica Press, 2006), 39-70 (available as a separate e-book from Deisel eBooks)
‘Unoriginal Authors: How to do things with texts in the Renaissance’ in Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ed. Holly Hamilton Bleakley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 73-92 (search inside on Google books)
‘From Germany to Italy to America: The migratory significance of Kristeller’s Ficino in the 1930s’ in Weltoffener Humanismus: Philosophie, Philologie und Geschichte in der deutsch-jüdischen Emigration, eds Gerald Hartung and Kay Schiller (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2006), 133-54 (publisher’s online catalogue)
‘Literature’ in Palgrave Advances in Renaissance Historiography, ed. Jonathan Woolfson (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), 210-40 (publisher's online catalogue; review by Daniel Woolf)
‘Montaigne’s Legacy’ in The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne, ed. U. Langer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 27-52 (search inside on Google books)
‘Humanism and Literature in Late Tudor England: Translation, the continental book and the case of Montaigne’s Essais’ in Reassessing Tudor Humanism, ed. Jonathan Woolfson (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2002), 243-68 (search inside on Amazon.co.uk)
'The Renaissance' in The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, ed. Peter France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 45-55 (publisher’s online catalogue)
'Pilgrimage to Parnassus: Local Intellectual Traditions, Humanist Education and the Cultural Geography of Sixteenth-Century England' in Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Ancient Learning, eds. Niall Livingstone and Yun Lee Too, 'Ideas in Context' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 110-47 (search inside on Google books)
'Vernacular Humanism in the sixteenth century' in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 189-202 (search inside on Google books)
(b) Articles in Journals
‘Awakening the Inner Man: Montaigne Framed for Modern Intellectual Life’, EMF: Studies in Early Modern France 9 (2004), 30-57 (journal’s online page)
‘The Analysis of Culture Revisited: Pure Texts, Applied Texts, Literary Historicisms, Cultural Histories’, Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (2003), 489-510 (available online on Project Muse)
‘‘Rationall Knowledges’ and ‘Knowledges … drenched in flesh and blood’: Fulke Greville, Francis Bacon and Institutions of Humane Learning in Tudor and Stuart England’, Sidney Journal 19 (2001), 11-40 (journal’s online page)
‘Michel de Montaigne et Anthony Bacon: la familia et la fonction des lettres’, Montaigne Studies 13 (2001), 241-76 )journal’s online page)
‘”Who taught thee Rhetoricke to deceive a maid?”: Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Juan Boscán’s Leandro, and Renaissance Vernacular Humanism’, Comparative Literature 52 (2000), 11-52 (available online on JStor)
'"A French Dexteritie, & An Italian Confidence": New Documents on John Florio, Learned Strangers and Protestant Humanist Study of Modern Languages in Renaissance England from c.1547 to c.1625', Reformation 2 (1997), 39-109 (journal published by The Tyndale Society)
'"Le moyen de voir ce Senecque escrit à la main": Montaigne's Journal de Voyage and the Politics of Science and Faveur in the Vatican Library', in '(Ré)interprétations: Études sur le seizième siécle', ed. John O'Brien, Michigan Romance Studies 15 (1995), 177-214 (journal’s online page)
(c) Chapters in volumes of conference proceedings
‘From father to son: Van Veen’s Montaigne and Van Ravesteyn’s Pieter van Veen, his son Cornelis and his clerk Hendrick Borsman’ in Montaigne and the Low Countries (1580-1700), eds Paul Smith and Karl Enenkel, ‘Intersections’ (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 263-303 (publisher’s online catalogue)
‘Marginal Commentaries: The Cultural Transmission of Montaigne’s Essais in Shakespeare’s England’ in Montaigne et Shakespeare: vers un nouvel humanisme, ed. Jean-Marie Maguin (Montpellier, 2004), 13-27 (full text available online in html and in pdf)
‘”Learning Mingled with Nobilitie”: Directions for Reading Montaigne’s Essais in their Institutional Context’ in ‘The Changing Face of Montaigne’: Proceedings of a conference held at the University of Exeter, 2-4 September 2000, ed. Keith Cameron (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2003), 337-62 (not available online)
‘Michel de Montaigne e ‘Frederic Maria della Rovere’: La chiave nascosta della biblioteca dell’ultimo Duca di Urbino’ in I Della Rovere nell’Italia delle Corti, eds. Bonita Cleri, Sabine Eiche, John E. Law, Feliciano Paoli, 4 vols (Urbino: Quattroventi, 2002), vol. 3, 93-114 (publisher’s online catalogue)
‘Literature, Thought or Fact? Past and Present Directions in the Study of the Early Modern Letter’ in Self-Presentation and Social Identification: The Rhetoric and Pragmatics of Letter Writing in Early Modern Times: Proceedings of the International Colloquium Leuven-Brussels, 24-28 May 2000, eds. Jan Papy, Toon van Houdt and Gilbert Tournoy (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2002), 137-64 (not available online)
(d) Selected review articles
Review article on Fantasies of Troy: Classical Tales and the Social Imaginary in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, eds Alan Shepard and Stephen D. Powell (2004), Renaissance Studies 21 (2007), 460-63 (available on Ingentaconnect or Blackwell Synergy)
Review article on Franco Piperno, L’immagine del Duca: Musica e spettacolo alla corte di Guidubaldo II duca d’Urbino (2001), Renaissance Studies 17 (2003), 305-09 (available on Blackwell Synergy)
Review article on Theodore K. Rabb, Renaissance Lives: Portraits of an Age (2000), The Historical Journal 46 (2003), 1005-08 (available on Cambridge Journals)