Dr Andrew Zurcher, Queens'

aez20@cam.ac.uk

 

 

Research Interests

I work on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, with a particular focus on the works of Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, and William Shakespeare. My research to date has emphasised early modern legal history, Elizabethan colonial and military activity in Ireland, textual studies (including palaeography and manuscript studies), the sixteenth-century reception of Academic and Pyrrhonist epistemology, early modern secretarial practice, and the theory and practice of allegory in the sixteenth century. I am currently working on several editorial projects: (with Christopher Burlinson) an edition of Ralph Kenvet's 1635 A Supplement of the Faery Queene; several editions of the works of Edmund Spenser; and (with Anne Dunan Page) the letters of Sir Thomas Browne for a new Collected Works under the general care of Claire Preston. I am also editing sixteenth-century materials for OUP's Oxford Scholarly Editions Online project.

With Raphael Lyne and Gavin Alexander, I wrote English Handwriting 1500-1700: An Online Course (http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/ehoc/), now part of an AHRC-funded project, based at the Cambridge Faculty of English, called Scriptorium: Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts, Online (http://scriptorium.english.cam.ac.uk/). I maintain both the Edmund Spenser Home Page (http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenser/) and the Sidney-Spenser Discussion List (http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/sidney-spenser/). I also help to run the Faculty's Centre for Material Texts (http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/cmt).

Areas of Graduate Supervision

I supervise graduate students on a variety of topics anywhere between Thomas More and John Milton.

Selected Publications

  • Andrew Zurcher, 'Milton on Tragedy: Law, Hypallage, and Participation', in Edward Jones, ed., Young Milton (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2012).
  • Andrew Zurcher, 'Deficiency and Supplement: Perfecting the Prosthetic Text', in Christopher Burlinson and Ruth Connolly, eds, Editing Stuart Poetry, a special edition of SEL (forthcoming 2011). 
  • Andrew Zurcher, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene: A Reading Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
  • Andrew Zurcher, 'Printing the Cantos of Mutabilitie in 1609', in Jane Grogan, ed., Celebrating Mutabilitie: Essays on Spenser's
    Mutabilitie Cantos (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).
  • Andrew Zurcher, Shakespeare and Law, Arden Critical Companions (London: Methuen, 2010).
  • Andrew Zurcher and Christopher Burlinson, 'Spenser's Secretarial Career', Oxford Spenser Handbook, ed. Richard McCabe
    (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
  • Andrew Zurcher and Christopher Burlinson (eds), Edmund Spenser: Selected Letters and Other Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
  • Andrew Zurcher, 'Consideration, Contract, and the End of The Comedy of Errors', Law and Humanities, 1 (2007), 145-65; repr.
    in Shakespeare and the Law, ed. Gary Watt and Paul Raffield (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2008).
  • Andrew Zurcher, Spenser's Legal Language: Law and Poetry in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Brewer, 2007).
  • Andrew Zurcher, "Texts and Resources", A Critical Companion to Spenser Studies, ed. Bart van Es (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006),pp.  244-273.
  • Andrew Zurcher, "Spenser's Studied Archaism: The Case of 'Mote'", Spenser Studies, 21 (2006), 231-240.
  • Andrew Zurcher, "Getting it Back to Front in 1590: Spenser's Dedications, Nashe's Insinuations, and Ralegh's Equivocations", Studies in the Literary Imagination, 38.2 (2005), 173-198.
  • Andrew Zurcher and Christopher Burlinson, "'Secretary to the Lord Grey Lord Deputie here': Edmund Spenser's Irish Papers", The Library, 7th series, 8 (2005), 30-75.