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Prof Sue Wiseman

Positions held:
  • Professor of Seventeenth Century Literature, School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
  • Research

    Research

    Research overview

    Sue Wiseman’s research interests are in Renaissance and
    seventeenth-century writing and culture.

    At present she is researching non-elite writing in seventeenth century England.

    Specific current interests iclude the places of the 'English Renaissance'  - from the elites and yeomen of Derbyshire to the widows of Shoreditch as
    suggested by literature, culture and material evidence.

    She is interested in the literature of change and transformation;
    women's writing; writing of the early seventeenth century and writing
    of the Civil War and the writing of 'love'and on London.

    She has recently written on topics including the captivity narrative, complaint, the literary and legal generation of the idea of the 'gypsy'; wolf-transformation, wild children.

    In recent publications she has discussed writers including Katherine
    Austen, John Donne, Elizabeth Delaval, Celia Fiennes, Mary Rowlandson, John Eliot Lodowick Muggleton.

    She is PI on the project Written Worlds.

    She runs the London Renaissance Seminar.

    Research projects

    Written Worlds in Seventeenth-Century England: the Work of Non-elite Writing.

    Funded by
    Leverhulme Trust
    Funding type
    Research Project Grant
  • Supervision and teaching

    Supervision and teaching

    Supervision

    Supervisions within Birkbeck:
    15

    Sue Wiseman has experience of supervising to completion Phds on love
    elegy; sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama and theatre; the popular discourse of the supernatural; the
    writing of death; women's poetry of the Renaissance and
    seventeenth-century; the writing of civil war. the psalms.

    She welcomes both proposals grounded in literary studies and those building outwards from such study towards other disciplines and areas.

    Current doctoral researchers

    • AMELIA ORMONDROYD WILLIAMS
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor, onwards
    • ANDREW REGAN
      Nature of supervision:
      Joint Principal Supervisor, onwards
      Title of thesis:
      The Reception of Classical Texts in the Works of Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne
      Description:

      My thesis concerns the seventeenth-century English prose writers Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne's reception of classical texts.  Despite Burton and Browne's profuse citations of classical writers, very little research has been done into these citations, and what they might tell us about classical reception in the English Renaissance.

    • GEORGINA TREVELYAN-CLARK
      Nature of supervision:
      Joint Principal Supervisor, onwards
    • MELISSA MARSH
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor, onwards
      Title of thesis:
      "Come and hear, all ye that fear God, and I will declare what he hath done for my soul." Sites and Moments of Psalm Use in the Seventeenth Century.
      Description:

      This thesis examines particular moments of psalm use to explore why and how the psalms were voiced. Throughout the long Reformation in England, the biblical psalms are voiced by believers at all levels of society; by the scholarly and the elite, by people of the middling sort in their homes and at church, by soldiers preparing for battle. The project builds on existing psalm studies by setting instances of psalm use in their historical contexts, examining prose and non-literary uses of psalmic language alongside poetic versions. The psalms were used to communicate and contest feelings and beliefs at moments when the relationship between divine and human authority was being renegotiated; a close study of psalmic language and practice, what has been termed psalm culture, suggests how early modern believers used the psalms as individuals, as a means of codifying their emotional experience, and communally, as a shared text, familiar to all.

    • TORBEN LUND
      Nature of supervision:
      Joint Principal Supervisor
      Title of thesis:
      How portraiture can explore the fashioning of Protestant Identity in the sixteenth century: a comparative study of England, Denmark-Norway and Sweden.
      Description:

      What was the significance of the portrait in the first generation of the Reformation? Responding to this question, this study examines portraits produced in three Northern European Protestant kingdoms - Sweden, Denmark-Norway and England - to explore the place of the portrait and those commissioned, made and saw it in those societies and the relationship amongst the image, the selection of those represented and the location of the portrait. The study investigates specifically what portrait can tell us about Protestant identity in the sixteenth century England, Denmark-Norway and Sweden. To do so, it explores a portrait of Sweden's king-elect Erik, commissioned by English courtiers, painted by a Netherlandish painter and presented to Queen Elizabeth in connection with his marriage proposal. The study will, furthermore, examine and compare six portraits of members of the urban elite in the three kingdoms. Portraits of citizens were not as common as those of members of the nobility in the sixteenth century Northern Europe. They have therefore not been subjected to extensive analysis to the same extent as portraits of royalty and nobility. The selected portraits reflect the importance contribution university-educated scholars and merchants made to shaping the new post-Reformation societies. It is the thesis of the study that the portraits discussed reflects a new identity, which the Protestant Ideology brought to the three kingdoms after the break with the Catholic Church.

    Doctoral alumni since 2013-14

    • JENNY REID
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor
      Title of thesis:
      Monuments of superstition, memories of idolatry: Early Modern Customary Culture in Shakespeare and Contemporaries
      Awarded:
      2024
    • KIERRI PRICE
      Nature of supervision:
      Joint Principal Supervisor, to
      Title of thesis:
      Books, Bodies, and Belief: Awkward technologies of protection in late medieval England
      Awarded:
      2024
    • REBECCA CLOSSICK
      Nature of supervision:
      Joint Principal Supervisor,
      Title of thesis:
      Staging the Poor Scholar in Elizabethan England
      Awarded:
      2024
    • JANE BASSETT
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor
      Title of thesis:
      Elegy and the Politics of Grief
      Description:

      My thesis asks what it meant to write elegy over the years 1640 to 1670, in an England shaken by the dramas of the Civil Wars, the regicide and the moves from monarchy to Commonwealth and Protectorate and back. Men and women writers from all sides of the political divides drew on different elegiac traditions and conventions over this period to mourn their dead, and how they used and transformed elegy as the political and military crisis in English society deepened and bitterness and anger intensified will be explored and evaluated in the light of extended critical debate as to how and in what ways elegy changed over this time, and the extent to which it survived as a genre under such pressures.

      The first chapter is concerned with how elegy developed over the period between 1641 and the end of 1648 as the Civil War ended and the trial and execution of Charles I neared. It asks how and in what ways elegists, both Royalist and Parliamentarian, drew on the traditions of public funeral elegy that had developed following the deaths of Sir Philip Sidney in 1586 and Prince Henry in 1612. It is argued that the polarisation and bitterness engendered by the Civil War led to many of the conventions of elegy and memorial writing being placed under increasing pressure, but that ultimately elegy’s flexibility as a genre sees its survival. The chapter is organised around three key sets of events: 1641 to 1642, as the country moved towards Civil War; 1646 and the  death of the Earl of Essex; 1648 and the deaths of royalist martyrs Lucas and Lisle, executed after the siege of Colchester in 1648, and their Parliamentarian counterpart Thomas Rainsborough assassinated two months later. It is argued that all three men are presented as martyrs, and their deaths used to attack their opponents in a highly polemical way. 

      The second chapter explores Royalist funeral elegy written in the wake of the regicide and reflecting the disbelief, rage and grief felt by Royalists. It is organised around detailed consideration of two collections of royalist elegies: the anonymous Vaticinium Votivum, and Monumentum Regale, which has been attributed to John Cleveland, and asks what were the purposes of the collators and writers of these elegies and how they used the elegiac forms available to them. The collections are explored in the context of the political polarisation that prevailed at the end of the second Civil War and it is argued that both collections reflect the ways in which funeral elegy had developed over the latter stages of the Civil War and become more polemical and satirical, while still drawing on key conventions such as praise and panegyric and expressions of grief 

      The final chapter explores the overtly political elegies of Royalist Hester Pulter and those of republican Lucy Hutchinson, mourning her husband, the regicide John Hutchinson who died in prison in 1664. Both privileged and highly educated women, the chapter considers how their writing was shaped by the constraints placed on women and by the personal and political isolation they both experienced. It asks how and for what purposes they drew on elegiac traditions, including both that of funeral elegy as it had developed over the Civil Wars and English pastoral elegy, and in what ways they could be said to have transformed elegy. 

       

       

       

      Awarded:
      2022
    • MASUDA QURESHI
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor,
      Title of thesis:
      Celestial philosophy: early modern women and the literary genres of philosophical expression (1640-1720)
      Awarded:
      2022
    • ROBERT STEARN
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor
      Title of thesis:
      Managing Skill, 1680–1730: Domestic Service and the Forms of Practical Knowledge
      Description:

      This thesis is a study of how skill in the specific realm of service was understood in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain. It examines how the aptitudes that were elicited in employers and demanded of servants by domestic service were represented as instances of skill. It demonstrates that in the period 1680–1730, domestic service offered diversely-situated writers ways to think about skill as a component of antagonistic everyday social relations and ways to think about those relations as practice or activity. In doing so, it brings to light a significant thread in the history of skill and identifies hitherto overlooked locations in which discourses and practices of skill may be found. The thesis is divided into five chapters. The first explores how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century handbooks and visual art modelled the qualities of ideal servants. It considers what pleasures employers were afforded by representations and imitations of servants. Chapters two and three, focussing on the manuscript meditations and diaries of Anne, Lady Halkett and Sarah, Lady Cowper, respectively, each offer a case study of how a writer occupying a sometimes compromised position of authority within her household reflected upon skill and service through extensive, recursive life-writing. Chapters four and five return to represented servants in the context of the expansive imagined geographies of adventure fiction. This popular mode built narratives around the practical knowledge elicited from protagonists by situations of extremity and thus offered a space within which skill and service could be explored. Chapter four examines how, in Defoe’s fictional and didactic works, scenes of management link bodily and social dexterity to ideologies of government, while chapter five explores what can be learned about skill by studying the ways in which narrative and material forms were re-written, adapted, and extended.

      Awarded:
      2022
    • SUSAN JONES
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor
      Title of thesis:
      Piracy, the Sea, and Self-Determination in Early Modern English Writing
      Awarded:
      2021
    • CATRIN GRIFFITHS
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor
      Title of thesis:
      Renovating romance: experimentation in English narrative fiction, 1645-1665
      Awarded:
      2019
    • EVA-MARIA LAUENSTEIN
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor
      Title of thesis:
      Women’s Mausoleums Imagined: Reformation, Text and Tomb c. 1550-1650
      Awarded:
      2019
    • SAMANTHA SMITH
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor
      Awarded:
      2018

    Teaching

    Teaching modules

    • Creative Arts, Culture and Communication Postgraduate Research (AREN060Z8)
    • Medieval Text and Intertext (AREN190S7)
    • European Drama and Theatre: Gods, Ideas and Adaptations (AREN247S5)
    • Lessons from the Medieval and Early Modern Body (AREN270S7)
    • Medieval and Early Modern Worlds (AREN293S7)
    • Medieval and Renaissance Literatures (ENHU003S5)
  • Publications

    Publications

    Article

    Book

    Book Section

    Editorial

    Other