Dr Joe Ashmore

Background

I studied for my BA and my PhD at Cambridge University, where I was also a Junior Research Fellow (at Gonville and Caius College). 

Teaching

My teaching takes in literature from about 1550 to around 1760, including the works of Shakespeare. 

Research

I work for the most part on the religious writing of the early modern period. I have published articles and essays on seventeenth-century devotional poetry, religious prose (especially sermons), and on the Bible as a material artefact. My first book examines the relationship between rhetoric, legal discourses and theology in early modern literary culture. I’m currently exploring two new areas of research: Shakespeare’s use of European legal discourses, and the ways in which early modern writing represents different cultures and their religious practices, especially in the American colonies.

Selected Publications

Making Belief: Testimony, Faith and Religion in Early Modern English Literature (under consideration at Cambridge University Press).

‘Attending to the Passion in Early Modern England: Lancelot Andrewes’s Good Friday Sermons’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 53/2 (2023).

‘The Bible as a Material Book in Early Modern Literature’, in The Bible and Western Christian Literature, vol. 2: Reformation and Renaissance, ed. by Sophie Read (London: Bloomsbury, 2023).

‘Faith in Lancelot Andrewes’s Preaching’, The Seventeenth Century, 32 (2017), 121-38.

‘Reimagining Scriptural Places in the Writing of Henry Vaughan’, Scintilla: The Journal of the Vaughan Association, 19 (2016), 34-50.