Dr R Lewis

Dr Rhodri Lewis, MA MSt DPhil

Fellow and Tutor in English

Research Interests

Early modern literary, intellectual and scholarly history; textual criticism and history of the book. He is currently at work on three projects. First, a monograph on the emergence of the “man of letters” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Second, editing (with Daniel Andersson and Sophie Weeks) volume 5 of the Oxford University Press edition of Francis Bacon's complete works, which comprises the De sapientia veterum (1609) and Bacon's early philosophical writings to about 1611. Third, editing (with Kate Bennett and William Poole) the correspondence of John Aubrey; this is one of the core components of Oxford’s cross-disciplinary “Cultures of Knowledge” project, funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation.

Teaching Areas

1509-1832, Shakespeare, English Language. He is co-convenor of the English MSt (1550-1780), and supervises graduate students at both MSt and DPhil level. Recent topics of supervision have included Roger Ascham, William Cornwallis, Francis Bacon, Henry More, John Aubrey, renaissance mythography, the early English essay, and the early history of shorthand.

Selected Publications

Books

William Petty on the Order of Nature: An Unpublished Manuscript Treatise (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies), forthcoming in late 2009.

Language, Mind and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke, “Ideas in Context” series, no. 80 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Articles

"Francis Bacon, Allegory and the Uses of Myth", Review of English Studies, forthcoming (2010).

"An Early Reader of Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel", Notes and Queries, forthcoming (2010).

"A Kind of Sagacity: Francis Bacon, the ars memoriae and the Pursuit of Natural Knowledge", Intellectual History Review 19 (2009), 155-77.

“Hooke’s Two Buckets: Memory, Mnemotechnique and Knowledge in the Early Royal Society”, in Ars Reminiscendi: Mind and Memory in Renaissance Culture, eds. Donald Beecher and Grant Williams (Toronto, 2009), 339-63.

“The Enlightenment”, in The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology, eds. Andrew Hass, David Jasper and Elisabeth Jay, Oxford University Press (2007), 97-114.

“Robert Hooke at 371”, Perspectives on Science 14 (2007), 672-87.

“Of ‘Origenian Platonisme’: Joseph Glanvill on the Pre-Existence of Souls”, Huntington Library Quarterly 69 (2006), 267-300.

“‘The Best Mnemonicall Expedient’: John Beale’s Art of Memory and its Uses”, The Seventeenth Century 20 (2005), 113-44.

“A Babel off Broad Street: Artificial Language Planning in 1650s Oxford”, History of Universities 19 (2005), 108-45.

“The Publication of John Wilkins’s Essay (1668): Some Contextual Considerations”, Notes and Records of the Royal Society 56 (2002), 133-46.

“The Efforts of the Aubrey Correspondence Group to Revise John Wilkins’s Essay (1668) and their context”, Historiographia Linguistica 28 (2001), 333-66.