Professor

Email: p dot w dot d dot mack at warwick dot ac dot uk

About

Professor Peter Mack is Emeritus Professor, and taught on the English and Comparative Literary Studies program.

Research interests

My research interests include Medieval and Renaissance European intellectual, cultural and literary history, and especially rhetoric. Most of my publications - among them, Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric and Dialectic (1993) – have been in fields connected with Renaissance rhetoric and dialectic. I have also published on rhetoric and literature, and on Chaucer. I have published a series of articles on fifteenth-and-sixteenth-century practices of reading. My Elizabethan Rhetoric (2002) studies the impact of grammar school and university training on Early Modern Practices of reading and writing in ethics, history, politics and religion. I was editor of Rhetorica (University of California Press) 1998-2002. Recent publications include a study of the ways in which Montaigne and Shakespeare used their training in rhetoric and their wider reading (2010) and the first comprehensive history of renaissance rhetoric, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric 1380-1620. In 2012 I gave the E. H. Gombrich Lectures in Hangzhou (China) on Rhetorical Theory and Renaissance Painting. Current projects include a book on literary traditions and collections of essays on the afterlife of Virgil and Plutarch.

Selected publications

• ed. (with Edward Chaney), England and the Continental Renaissance: Essays in Honour of J. B. Trapp (1990)
• Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric and Dialectic (1993)
• ed., Renaissance Rhetoric (1994)
• ed. (with Chris Walton), The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (1994)
• ed. (with Chris Walton), The Miller’s Tale (1995)
• ed. (with Andy Hawkins) The Nun’s Priest’s Tale (1996)
• Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (2002)
• Reading and Rhetoric in Montaigne and Shakespeare (2010)
• A History of Renaissance Rhetoric 1380-1620 (2011)
• ed. (with John North), The Afterlife of Ovid (2016)
• ed. (with R. Williams), Michael Baxandall, Vision and the Work of Words (2016)
• Rhetoric's Questions, Reading and Interpretation (2017)

Professional associations

• Fellow of the British Academy

Qualifications

• MA (Oxford)
• MPhil, PhD (Warburg Institute, London)
• DLitt (Warwick)