Joshua Gleave, Downing

Biographical Information

Before my MPhil, I completed a BA in English at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge in 2025. My research has largely concerned Anglican literature in the modern period. This included three dissertations:

1. 'the fields was our church': John Clare, Methodism, and Sacred Space, studying Clare's methodistical rejection of the Established Church's spatial logic;
2. 'The Full Aspect of the Past': Modern Grail Fiction and the Victorian Sensorium, c. 1907-30, tracking the sense of 'era' operative in stories by three Anglo-Catholic authors (Arthur Machen, Evelyn Underhill, and Charles Williams) in which the Holy Grail appears in modern settings; and
3. Fr. Bernard Walke's Bethlehem: at St. Hilary, on the Wireless, digging up a forgotten amateur Nativity play, played in a rural Cornish church and broadcast by the BBC from 1926-34. See a copy here. I have adapted this piece into an article, and hope to see it published in due course.

My MPhil research continues my previous work, as a study of the 'Bethlehem Tableaux' which began a revival of church plays in late-C19 Britain; these told the Christmas story in successive tableaux vivants, accompanied by readings and carols. Provisionally titled Amateur Theatrics and Theophanic Aesthetics: 'Bethlehem Tableaux' in Britain, c. 1871-1939, my dissertation proposes a theatre more of contemplation than action.

Research Interests

Theology and literature; Amateur drama; Modern drama; Liturgics; Continental thought; Psychoanalysis