Guilherme Nabais Freitas, Trinity
Course: English
Supervisor: Dr Sophie Read
Dissertation Title:
Englished, Mythologiz’d and Represented in Figures’: Mythographic Practice in Renaissance England from Spenser to Milton
Biographical Information
Before returning to Trinity College (B.A., 2017-2020), I completed the MSt (1550-1700) in English at Christ Church, Oxford.
My PhD thesis approaches in an Empsonian sort of way the relationship between Graeco-Roman (and in one case Mesoamerican) myth and poetics in early modern England. Each chapter looks at how a specific poet or set of poets approach a common mythic motif to say something about how they write poetry, their desired readership, and their position within self-constructed intellectual lineages. What I am tentatively calling "mythic confections", as they appear in early modern poetry, stand somewhere in between philologically straightforward quellenforschung and Leonard Barkan's metamorphic Renaissance myths, at the same time resisting the textual assimilation on which both rely.
I have further research interests in the early modern sermon (c.1550-1670); classical and renaissance rhetoric; influence in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England (including its Italian and French interlocutors); how we define and think about the tragic genre transhistorically.
Last academic year (2022-23), I co-convened the Faculty's Graduate Research Forum, as well as the History Faculty's Workshop for the Early Modern Period. I co-organised, with Juliette Bretan, the English Faculty's inaugural Graduate Symposium on "How do stories shape our world?". For the 2023-4 admissions cycle, I was a marker for the Cambridge English Literature Admissions Test (CELAT). Outside the Faculty, I play an active role in my college's MCR as Liaison Officer (the point of contact between postgraduate students and the college fellowship).
At Cambridge, I have taught Part IA, Paper 2 'Shakespeare'; Part IB, Paper 5 'English Literature and its Contexts, 1500-1700'; Part II, Paper 2 'Tragedy'; and, Part II, Paper 15 'The Ethical Imagination'. I have also supervised numerous dissertations.
My doctoral studies are generously funded by Trinity College's Alice and James Penney Studentship in English or European Literature.
Research Interests
Myth, Poetics, Sermon Studies, Rhetoric, Patristic Reception, Early Modern Science, Neo-Latin poetry.
I also have a long-standing interest in the writing of Pearl S. Buck (especially looking beyond The Good Earth).
Selected Publications
Book Chapters
- 'Lancelot Andrewes et William Perkins: Perspectives protestantes sur le corps dans l'Angleterre élisabéthaine et jacobine', trans. Ueli Zahnd and Paul-Alexis Mellet, in Une religion sans corps? Corporalité et incarnation dans la pensée de la première réforme, eds. Benedikt Brunner, Ueli Zahnd, Paul-Alexis Mellet (Geneva, Droz) (forthcoming)
Journal Articles
- 'How to do things with the Church Fathers: Mary Magdalene and Anti-Calvinist court rhetoric in Lancelot Andrewes’s Easter Sermons (1620-22)', The Seventeenth Century, 37, 4 (July-August 2022), 519-534.
- 'Anti-Spenserian Amaranth in Milton's Lycidas', Notes & Queries, 69, 1 (March 2022), 28-31.
Selected Talks
Co-Organised
- "How do Stories Shape our World?" - Inaugural Graduate Symposium, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge (5th May, 2023) - Plenary Speaker: Prof. Dr. Benjamin Kohlmann (Universität Regensburg)
Presented at
- 'Godly Mourning and Protestant Cambridge in Harley MS 976', "Preachers, Hearers, Readers, and Scribes", Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons, Harvard Divinity School and Congregational Library and Archives, Cambridge and Boston MA (3rd-5th October 2024)
- 'Abraham Cowley’s Aztec Mythmaking: A Closer Look at Book V of De Plantis Libri (1668)' - Eighth International Forum Series "World Maps and World Cultures", Institute for World Literatures and Cultures, Tsinghua University (with Nanjing University), Nanjing (18th November, 2023) [Nanjing University Travel and Accommodation Grant]
- 'Portuguese Milton and his Enlightenment Paratexts: Jose Amaro da Silva's Paraiso Perdido (1789) and Obras da Milton (1819)' - Thirteenth International Milton Symposium, Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, University of Toronto (11th July, 2023) [IMS Early Career Scholar Grant]
- 'Sacramental Poetry and Seventeenth-Century English Anti-Calvinism: Peter Heylyn's Poetry Notebook' - Twelfth Annual REFORC Conference on Early Modern Christianity, Reformation Research Consortium, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (13th May, 2023)
- 'George Herbert and John Milton's Cambridge Elegies: Baroque Neo-Latinity and the Politics of Myth' - Sixth Triennial Conference of the George Herbert Society, 'George Herbert and Eloquence', Cambridge (25th June, 2022)
- '"That Giant in all kinde of learning": Plato in John Donne's Sermons' - Seminar Series, Medieval and Early Modern Student Association, Durham University (14th February, 2022)