Dr. John Colley
Biography
I work on classical reception across late medieval and 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. My work has variously been supported by grants and fellowships from Jesus College and Linacre College in Oxford, the AHRC, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the University of Glasgow Library, The Huntington Library, CRASSH (Cambridge's Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities), Cambridge Humanities Research Grants, and the British Academy. I have recently collaborated with Shakespeare's Globe for a public 'Research in Action' event on early modern university drama.
Research Interests
Early modern classical reception; drama; translation; neo-Latin; manuscript studies.
Connect with John
Publications
Books
Humanism, English Literature, and the Translation of Greek, 1430–1560 (OUP, 2025). *Reviews: Translation and Literature; Review of English Studies; International Journal of the Classical Tradition.
The Coniuracion of Lucius Sergius Catelina: An Early Tudor Translation of Sallust’s ‘Bellum Catilinae’, EETS o.s. 366 (OUP, 2025). *Review: International Journal of the Classical Tradition.
Peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters
'Muteness and Mute Women in Early Modern Drama: Gender, Race, Disability, and the Classical Tradition', Renaissance Quarterly 80.3 (forthcoming 2027)
'Philological Trifling? Avoiding Greek in Shakespeare', in Imagining Antiquity in Shakespeare's England, ed. Heather James and Andrew Wallace (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026), 111–31
'“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)]