Alison Shell is a British scholar and literary critic. She is a professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at University College London. Most of her scholarly work explores the relationship between Christianity and literature in Britain from the Reformation to the 21st century.
Shell was educated at North London Collegiate School and St Hilda’s College, Oxford, where she obtained a B.A./M.A. and D.Phil. [1]
Shell served as a Rare Books Curator at the Royal Institute of British Architects before becoming a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at University College London (UCL) from 1994 to 1997. Her first permanent academic position was at the University of Durham, where she worked from 1997 to 2010 before returning to UCL. [1]
Since 2010, Shell has been a series editor for the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. Alongside Thomas S. Freeman and Ann Hutchison, she founded the series ‘Catholic and Recusant Texts of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods.’ She also serves on the editorial boards for the journals British Catholic History [2] and Reformation. She reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, [3] and in 2024 she preached the annual Shakespeare Sermon at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon.
Shell is a fellow of the British Academy, [4] the English Association, [5] and the Society of Antiquaries. [6] She has held visiting fellowships at the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale. [7]
Gothic fiction, sometimes called Gothic horror, is a loose literary aesthetic of fear and haunting. The name refers to Gothic architecture of the European Middle Ages, which was characteristic of the settings of early Gothic novels.
Recusancy was the state of those who remained loyal to the Catholic Church and refused to attend Church of England services after the English Reformation.
The Castle of Otranto is a novel by Horace Walpole. First published in 1764, it is generally regarded as the first gothic novel. In the second edition, Walpole applied the word 'Gothic' to the novel in the subtitle – A Gothic Story. Set in a haunted castle, the novel merged medievalism and terror in a style that has endured ever since. The aesthetic of the book has shaped modern-day gothic books, films, art, music, and the goth subculture.
Sir Henry Spelman was an English antiquary, noted for his detailed collections of medieval records, in particular of church councils.
Early modern Britain is the history of the island of Great Britain roughly corresponding to the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. Major historical events in early modern British history include numerous wars, especially with France, along with the English Renaissance, the English Reformation and Scottish Reformation, the English Civil War, the Restoration of Charles II, the Glorious Revolution, the Treaty of Union, the Scottish Enlightenment and the formation and the collapse of the First British Empire.
Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke was among the first Englishwomen to gain notice for her poetry and her literary patronage. By the age of 39, she was listed with her brother Philip Sidney and with Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare among the notable authors of the day in John Bodenham's verse miscellany Belvidere. Her play Antonius is widely seen as reviving interest in soliloquy based on classical models and as a likely source of Samuel Daniel's closet drama Cleopatra (1594) and of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (1607). She was also known for translating Petrarch's "Triumph of Death", for the poetry anthology Triumphs, and above all for a lyrical, metrical translation of the Psalms.
Sir Andrew Jonathan Bate, is a British academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, scholar, and occasional novelist, playwright and poet. He specializes in Shakespeare, Romanticism and ecocriticism. He is Regents Professor of Literature and Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities in a joint appointment in the Department of English in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the School of Sustainability in the Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University, as well as a Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford, where he holds the title of Professor of English Literature. Bate was Provost of Worcester College from 2011 to 2019. From 2017 to 2019 he was Gresham Professor of Rhetoric in the City of London. He was knighted in 2015 for services to literary scholarship and higher education. He is also Chair of the Hawthornden Foundation.
Arden of Faversham is an Elizabethan play, entered into the Register of the Stationers Company on 3 April 1592, and printed later that same year by Edward White. It depicts the real-life murder of Thomas Arden by his wife Alice Arden and her lover, and their subsequent discovery and punishment. The play is notable as perhaps the earliest surviving example of domestic tragedy, a form of Renaissance play which dramatized recent and local crimes rather than far-off and historical events.
Luminalia or The Festival of Light was a late Caroline era masque or "operatic show", with an English libretto by Sir William Davenant, designs by Inigo Jones, and music by composer Nicholas Lanier. Performed by Queen Henrietta Maria and her ladies in waiting on Shrove Tuesday, 6 February 1638, it was one of the last and most spectacular of the masques staged at the Stuart Court.
The religious views of William Shakespeare are the subject of an ongoing scholarly debate dating back more than 150 years. The general assumption about William Shakespeare's religious affiliation is that he was a conforming member of the established Church of England. However, many scholars have speculated about his personal religious beliefs, based on analysis of the historical record and of his published work, with claims that Shakespeare's family may have had Catholic sympathies and that he himself was a secret Catholic.
From its premiere at the turn of the 17th century, Hamlet has remained Shakespeare's best-known, most-imitated, and most-analyzed play. The character of Hamlet played a critical role in Sigmund Freud's explanation of the Oedipus complex. Even within the narrower field of literature, the play's influence has been strong. As Foakes writes, "No other character's name in Shakespeare's plays, and few in literature, have come to embody an attitude to life ... and been converted into a noun in this way."
Michael C. Questier is an English academic and historian.
Dowry of Mary is a title used in Catholic contexts to refer to England. It dates back to medieval times and had become widespread by the middle of the fourteenth century. It reflects the deep devotion to Mary that existed in medieval England, and the belief that she took a particular protective interest in the country's affairs.
The Wisbech Stirs was a divisive quarrel between English Roman Catholic clergy held prisoner in Wisbech Castle in the Isle of Ely, Cambridgeshire, towards the end of the reign of Elizabeth I of England. It set some of the secular clergy against the regular clergy represented by the Society of Jesus, the religious institute that was emerging as clerical leaders, and who wished for a more ordered communal life in the prison.
Katherine Dorothea Duncan-Jones, was an English literature and Shakespeare scholar and was also a Fellow of New Hall, Cambridge (1965–1966), and then Somerville College, Oxford (1966–2001). She was also Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford from 1998 to 2001. She was a scholar of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
"A Fig for Fortune" is a 1596 long allegorical poem by the English Catholic writer Anthony Copley written as a parodying response to Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. It intended to reject both Protestant portrayals of English Catholics as inherently disloyal to Queen Elizabeth, as well as hard-line Jesuit calls for Catholics to become martyrs by resisting the Protestant Queen.
Amanda Eubanks Winkler is a British-American scholar of English music and theater. She is Director of the Department of Music at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. Formerly she was Chair and Professor of Music History and Cultures in the Department of Art and Music Histories at Syracuse University College of Arts and Sciences. Between 2017–2020, she collaborated with the theater historian Richard Schoch on the AHRC Research Project Performing Restoration Shakespeare.
Patrick Gerard Cheney is an American scholar of English Renaissance Literature. He is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University.
Marie Axton (1937–2014), birth name Marie Horine, was an American scholar of Elizabethan drama, who made her academic career in the United Kingdom. She married Richard Axton of Christ's College, Cambridge in 1962. In 1979 she became the first woman appointed a junior proctor by the University of Cambridge.
Paulina Kewes is a Polish historian of early modern literature, history and culture. She is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Helen Morag Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Jesus College.