Dr. Katrin Ettenhuber
Biography
Katrin was born and raised in Germany and came to Cambridge as an undergraduate, as a scholar of the German National Scholarship Foundation. She spent nine years at Christ’s College as a student and a Research Fellow, before moving to Pembroke, where she is currently a Fellow and Director of Studies in English. Her latest book, The Logical Renaissance: Literature, Cognition, and Argument, 1479-1630, won the 2024 British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Prize.
Research Interests
Katrin works mainly on the literary and intellectual culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Her areas of specialisation are religious writing – especially in relation to the patristic and medieval sources of Renaissance literature – and the history of rhetoric and dialectic in the early modern period; she has published extensively on both.
Areas of Graduate Supervision
Topics relating to research interests (above). Contributes to teaching on the M.Phil. in English Studies.
Connect with Katrin
Publications
The Logical Renaissance: Literature, Cognition, and Argument, 1479-1630 (Oxford University Press, 2023); funded by the Isaac Newton Trust.
The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne, vol. 5: Sermons Preached at Lincoln’s Inn, 1620-23 (Oxford University Press, 2015); funded by an Early Career Fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council
Donne’s Augustine: Renaissance Cultures of Interpretation (Oxford University Press, 2011); funded by a Fellowship from the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
Renaissance Figures of Speech, ed. Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge University Press, 2008). Voted Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2008
'God in Scripture Study Aids', in Words at War: The Contested Language of the Civil War, ed. Andrew Hadfield and Paul Hammond (Oxford, 2024)
'Reforming the Arts of Discourse: Rhetoric, Dialectic, and the Maxim of 'Sola Scriptura', in The Bible and Literature: The Renaissance and Reformation Periods, ed. Sophie Read (Bloomsbury Press, 2024)
'Rhetoric and Religion: The Protestant World', in The Cambridge History of Rhetoric, vol. 3: Rhetoric in the Renaissance, ed. Virginia Cox and Jennifer Richards (Cambridge University Press, 2024)
'Erasmus among the Dialecticians: Copia and Its Discontents', Erasmus Studies, 43 (2023). The 41st Erasmus Birthday Lecture, delivered at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, April 2022
'Milton's Logic: The Early Years', The Seventeenth Century, 36 (2021)
‘Reception in the Age of Reformations: The Confessions 150-1650’, in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine's Confessions, ed. Tarmo Toom (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
'Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English Sermons', The Oxford Research Encyclopedia (2020). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1197
‘Sex and the Disjunctive Syllogism: The Logic of Love in Donne's Poetry’, English Literary History, 86 (2019). Winner of the Distinguised Publication Award, John Donne Society
‘Reading and Interpretation’, in John Donne in Context, ed. Michael Schoenfeldt (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
‘Prayer in Context: The Dynamics of Worship in Donne’s Encænia Sermon (1623)’, in Prayer and Performance, ed. Joseph Sterrett (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
‘“A Comely Gate to So Rich and Glorious a Citie”: The Paratextual Architecture of the Rheims New Testament and the King James Bible’, in The Oxford Handbook to the Early Modern Bible, ed. Kevin Killeen, Helen Smith, and Rachel Willie (Oxford University Press, 2015)
‘How to Do Things With Rhetoric’, in Oxford Handbooks Online (Oxford University Press, 2015)
‘English Sermons, 1500-1800’, in The Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine, ed. Karla Pollmann et al. (Oxford University Press, 2013)
‘“Tears of Passion” and “Inordinate Lamentation”: Complicated Grief in Donne and Augustine’, in Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern England, ed. Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis (Ashgate, 2013)
‘“Take vp and read the Scriptures”: Patristic Interpretation and the Poetics of Abundance in “The Translators to the Reader”’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 75 (2012)
‘The Preacher and Patristics’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, ed. Hugh Adlington, Peter McCullough, and Emma Rhatigan (Oxford University Press, 2011)
‘“Comparisons are Odious”: Revisiting the Metaphysical Conceit in Donne’, The Review of English Studies; published online 9 November 2010, at res.oxfordjournals.org (published in print vol. 62 (2011))
‘Hyperbole’, in Renaissance Figures of Speech
‘Introduction’ (with Sylvia Adamson and Gavin Alexander), in Renaissance Figures of Speech
‘“Take Heed what you Hear”: Re-reading Donne’s Lincoln’s Inn Sermons’, John Donne Journal, 26 (2007)
‘“The best help God’s people have”: Manuscript Culture and the Construction of Anti-Calvinist Communities in Seventeenth-Century England’, The Seventeenth Century, 22 (2007)
‘“Keeping the Peace”: Politics and Patristics in Donne’s Whitsunday Sermon of 1629’, in The Church Fathers in Early Modern England, ed. Mitchell M. Harris and Steven Matthews (Toronto University Press, forthcoming 2025)
Reviews for The Review of English Studies, The Times Higher Education Supplement, Early Modern Literary Studies, The Seventeenth Century, Spenser Studies, Renaissance Quarterly, Literature and Theology.