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. In 2004, he moved to the Warburg Institute, London, to edit the correspondence of Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609). He joined the department at Warwick in 2011.
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).
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Alongside his work on Casaubon's letters, Dr Botley is assembling unpublished manuscript material relating to the life and work of the German scholar Johannes Woverius (Wouwer, 1574-1612).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.
Selected publications
- With Máté Vince, ed. The Correspondence of Isaac Casaubon, 1610-1614. 4 vols. Geneva: Droz, 2018.
- Richard 'Dutch' Thomson (c. 1569-1613): The Life and Letters of a Renaissance Scholar. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016.
- With Dirk van Miert, ed. The Correspondence of Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609). 8 vols. Geneva: Droz, 2012.
- Learning Greek in Western Europe, 1396-1529. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2010.
- Latin Translation in the Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004 (paperback 2009).
For a full list of publications, see here.
"Deadline? What deadline?" (Pliny, Natural History, 1582, p. 20)
All images on this webpage (c) P. Botley, 2018
Contact hours
During the autumn term 2018 and the spring term 2019 my contact hours are:
Wednesdays 10.00-11.00 am
Thursdays 10.00-11.00 am
If you can't make these times, please email me to arrange a meeting.
Teaching
EN121 Medieval to Renaissance Literature
EN301 Shakespeare and Selected Dramatists of his Time
Isaac Casaubon, 1559-1614
