Edward Stein, Trinity

Biographical Information

I read for the B.A. in English Language and Literature at Keble College, Oxford, where I won the Gibbs Prize for an essay on early modern true crime pamphlets. I then took the M.St. in English Literatue 1550-1700 at Merton College, Oxford, where I wrote a dissertation on concepts liquidity and mobility in the pamphlets of John Taylor, the 'Water-Poet' and in early modern culture more widely.

My PhD project offers a fresh approach to early modern English popular print pamphleteering, refocusing its distinct rhetoric and style, as well as its role in the development of a concept of English literature and criticism. Its central claim is that print authors in the early seventeenth century contributed to the emergence of a popular imaginary – which addressed shared concerns about the diffusion of print, authority, and the social order – alongside a distinct pamphlet rhetoric and style. This rhetoric and style were ‘world-making’, to borrow Michael Warner’s term – at once imagining and calling into being an inclusive mass audience with a set of values in common. By revealing the complex texture of seventeenth-century pamphlets over the course of its chapters, the thesis argues that pamphlet style not only reflected the sophistication of pamphlet readers but worked to constitute an informed and literate pamphlet-reading public. The project focuses on the pamphlets of John Taylor (1578-1653), alias ‘the Water-Poet’, perhaps the most prolific pamphleteer of the seventeenth century and one of the most self-conscious and unashamedly commercialist writers of the period. As a Thames waterman, a liminal figure as comfortable conversing with urbane West End lawyers as the disreputable patrons of the alehouse, Taylor embodied the dynamic relation obtaining at the time between elite and popular culture.

I have presented on my research at meetings of the Society for Renaissance Studies (Bristol, 2025) and the Renaissance Society of America (Boston, MA, 2025), as well as at conferences held at the Centre for Early Modern Studies at Oxford (2022) and the British and Irish Spenser Seminar at the University of Sussex (2023). I have also shared my findings at meetings of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (2022; 2023). In 2022, I worked as a research assistent on the Thomas Nashe Project, and I look forward to contributing to the Oxford Handbook of Thomas Nashe (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Research Interests

Pamphleteering; cheap print; popular culture; public sphere; celebrity; theatre; history of literary criticism; Thomas Nashe; Ben Jonson.

Selected Publications

• ‘Tom Nash and the Water-Poet; or, Nashe’s Popularity Revisited … Again’, in The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Nashe, ed. by Andrew Hadfield, Jennifer Richards, and Kate De Rycker (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
• ‘Allusions to Marlowe and Jonson in a Dedicatory Poem in Taylor’s Workes, with an Attribution to Richard Hatton’, Notes & Queries, 71.1 (2024), pp. 80-84.
• ‘“Turning and returning”: John Taylor’s Labouring-Class Poetics’, Northern Early Modern Network (5 May 2023) <https://earlymodernnetwork.wordpress.com/2023/05/05/turning-and-returning-john-taylors-labouring-class-poetics/>.