Dr Paul Botley

Associate Professor (Reader)

Email: paul dot botley at warwick dot ac dot uk

H5.13
Humanities Building, University Road, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL

About

Dr Paul Botley is Associate Professor (Reader), and teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies and in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance. He studied at Reading (BA), York (MA) and Cambridge (PhD). He has held fellowships at Cambridge University Library, at the University of Bristol, and at Imperial College, London. He was Scaliger Fellow at the Warburg Institute, London, for seven years, before joining the department at Warwick.

Research interests

Dr Botley's research interests include the classical tradition in early modern literature; renaissance letters; neo-Latin literature; Erasmus; the history of the Bible; education in the renaissance; translation; the Greek diaspora in renaissance Europe; and the history of scholarship. His earliest work, and his first two books, focussed on Byzantine and Italian literature of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. His current research centres on the nothern European renaissance of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In 2012 he published with Dirk van Miert an edition of the letters of the renaissance polymath Joseph Scaliger (d. 1609) in eight volumes. More recently, he has published a book on one of the translators of the King James Bible, Richard ‘Dutch’ Thomson (d. 1613).

Casaubon portrait

Dr Botley's research on the letters of the great renaissance scholar Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614) has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust. This project prepared a critical edition of Isaac Casaubon’s correspondence during his last years in England, 1610-1614, when he was at the height of his powers and his international fame. The edition contains over seven hundred letters, nearly half of which have never been printed, and has now been published in four volumes in Geneva. With this edition complete, work is now underway on an edition of Casaubon's correpondence from his earliest years, while he taught at Geneva and Montpellier in the late sixteenth century.

Alongside his work on Casaubon's letters, Dr Botley is assembling unpublished manuscript material relating to the life and work of the German scholar Johannes Woverius (Wouwer, 1574-1612). Woverius' work included his treatise De polymathia (1603), an incomplete, flawed and possibly plagiarised study of universal learning. Woverius' correspondence was heavily censored on its publication in 1618, and this new manuscript material will allow much of this censorship to be unpicked.

Teaching and supervision

Paul Botley teaches EN121 Medieval to Renaissance Literature and EN301 Shakespeare . He teaches on the MA degree in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance. He is happy to supervise work on any aspect of early modern literature.