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, Mute Characters from Antiquity to the Age of Shakespeare, 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.
Recently, I have also organised an international conference in Cambridge, '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
Mute Characters from Antiquity to the Age of Shakespeare (in preparation)
Humanism, English Literature, and the Translation of Greek, 1430–1560 (OUP, 2025)
The Coniuracion of Lucius Sergius Catelina: An Early Tudor Translation of Sallust’s ‘Bellum Catilinae’, EETS o.s. 366 (OUP, 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), 115–44
'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 UP, 2024), 237–53
'Xenophon in English: The Sources of William Barker's Education of Cyrus', Notes and Queries 70 (2023), 146–51
'Thomas Elyot and the Translation of Galen', Review of English Studies 74 (2023), 619–34
'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
'Branding Barclay: The Printed Glosses and Envoys to Alexander Barclay's Shyp of Folys (1509)', Philological Quarterly 99 (2020), 147–70
Reviews
review of Devani Singh, Chaucer’s Early Modern Readers: Reception in Print and Manuscript (CUP, 2023), in Speculum 100 (2025), 865–7
review of James Bradley Wells, HoneyVoiced: A Translation of Pindar’s Songs for Athletes (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 (CUP, 2023), in Translation and Literature 32 (2023), 225–32
review of Stephanie Burt, After Callimachus: Poems (Princeton UP, 2020), in Translation and Literature 31 (2022), 374–80
'Quoting the Bard', Cambridge Quarterly 49 (2020), 96–101 [a review of Regula Hohl Trillini, Casual Shakespeare: Three Centuries of Verbal Echoes (Routledge, 2018)]
