Dr John Colley, St John's
jwsc5@cam.ac.uk
Biographical Information
I work on classical reception in Renaissance literature. My first monograph, Humanism, English Literature, and the Translation of Greek, 1430–1560 (OUP, 2025), pushes classical reception scholarship in more formally and generically diverse directions. It argues that late medieval and early Tudor English writers experienced a contradictory relationship to Greek: intense desire for the language and what it stood for was undercut partly by its frequent mediation via Latin and other vernaculars, and partly by the religious divisions that it came to reflect and magnify. My second book, a critical edition of the first ever translation of a Roman history into English (EETS/OUP, 2025), demonstrates that more carefully historicized readings of Roman history took place earlier in England than scholars have previously claimed. More generally, my books and articles underscore that the classical tradition encompasses the reception of both literary and ostensibly non-literary (e.g. medical) texts, includes the transmission of works by Church Fathers, and is bound up with issues of gender and race.
I'm now preparing my second monograph, 'Personae mutae': Muteness and Mute Characters from Antiquity to the Renaissance, which theorizes a concept of muteness which is distinct from more general ideas or instances of silence in Renaissance drama. The book will address a range of dramatic (and, occasionally, non-dramatic) works, in both English and Latin, by authors such as Thomas More, Jonson, Chapman, George Ruggle, and Shakespeare.
Currently I am also organising an international conference in Cambridge for July 2025, 'Staging Silence from Antiquity to the Renaissance' (see https://stagingsilence.wordpress.com).
Research Interests
Classical reception; Renaissance drama; translation; neo-Latin; early print; manuscript studies.
Selected Publications
Books
'Personae mutae': Muteness and Mute Characters from Antiquity to the Renaissance (in preparation)
Humanism, English Literature, and the Translation of Greek, 1430–1560 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025)
The Coniuracion of Lucius Sergius Catelina: An Early Tudor Translation of Sallust’s ‘Bellum Catilinae’, EETS o.s. 366 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2025)
Articles and book chapters
‘“Maniacal Ciceronianism”? Costanzo Felici’s De coniuratione Catilinae and Historical Writing in the Early Cinquecento’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters 10 (2025), 115–43
'A Lost Ballad Found: "A Lamentable Songe of the Daugtor of Iephtha" (ca. 1567–1568)', Studies in Philology 122 (2025), 180–98
'Diodorus Siculus in the English Quattrocento: New Light on the Source of Skelton’s Bibliotheca historica’, Medium Ævum 93 (2024), 389–407
'“Et melles en semble”: Literariness and a Trilingual Recipe Collection from Late Medieval England', in Recipes and Book Culture in England, 1350–1600, ed. Carrie Griffin and Hannah Ryley (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2024), 237–53
'Xenophon in English: The Sources of William Barker's Education of Cyrus', Notes and Queries 70 (2023), 146–51 [open access]
'Thomas Elyot and the Translation of Galen', Review of English Studies 74 (2023), 619–34 [open access]
'Henrician Homer: English Verse Translations from the Iliad and Odyssey, 1531–1545', Translation and Literature 31 (2022), 149–78
'Chaucer’s “Ebrayk Josephus” and The House of Fame', Studies in the Age of Chaucer 43 (2021), 45–74
Reviews
I have reviewed books for Speculum, Translation and Literature, and The Cambridge Quarterly. Published reviews include:
review of James Bradley Wells, HoneyVoiced: A Translation of Pindar’s Songs for Athletes (London: Bloomsbury, 2024), in Translation and Literature 33 (2024), 245–51
review of Chris Preddle, Sappho: Songs and Poems, Translated from the Greek (Belfast, 2022) and Diane J. Rayor and André Lardinois, Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works (Cambridge, 2023), in Translation and Literature 32 (2023), 225–32
review of Stephanie Burt, After Callimachus: Poems (Princeton, 2020), in Translation and Literature 31 (2022), 374–80
'Roman Greatness', Cambridge Quarterly 50 (2021), 401–7 [a review of John-Mark Philo, 'An Ocean Untouched and Untried': The Tudor Translations of Livy (Oxford, 2020) and Nigel Mortimer, Medieval and Early Modern Portrayals of Julius Caesar: The Transmission of an Idea (Oxford, 2020)]
'Quoting the Bard', Cambridge Quarterly 49 (2020), 96–101 [a review of Regula Hohl Trillini, Casual Shakespeare: Three Centuries of Verbal Echoes (London, 2018)]
